The patient experimenting with the chips was a terrible ordeal to Ann. The man whom she supposed to be her father lay almost the whole length of the canoe so close to her, and yet she could not pass his outstretched feet to give him food or stimulant. At last, at last, to her great joy, she found the place where the chips floated outward with steady motion. She then pushed her canoe in among the trees, thankful to know that it, at least, had been there before, that there would be no pass too narrow for it. The canoe itself was almost like a living creature to her by this time. Like an intelligent companion in the search, it responded with gentle motion to her slightest touch.
It seemed to Ann that the light of the moon was now growing very strong and clear. Surely no moon had ever before become so bright! Ann looked about her, almost for a moment dreading some supernatural thing, and then she realised that the night was gone, that pale dawn was actually smiling upon her. It gave her a strange sense of lightheartedness. Her heart warmed with love to the sight of the purple tint in the eastern sky, that bluish purple which precedes the yellow sunrise. On either side of her boat now the water was so shallow that sedge and rushes rose above it.
The herons flapped across her path to their morning fishing.
The creek still made a narrow channel for the canoe. Pretty soon its current flowed between wild undulating tracts of bright green moss in which the trees still stood dead, but bark and lichen now adhered to their trunks, and a few more strokes brought her to the fringes of young spruce and balsam that grew upon the drier knolls. She smelt living trees, dry woods and pastures in front. Then a turn of the narrow creek, and she saw a log-house standing not twenty paces from the stream. Above and around it maples and elms held out green branches, and there was some sort of a clearing farther on.
Ann felt exultant in her triumph. She had brought her boat to a place of safety. She seemed to gather life and strength from the sun; although it still lay below the blue horizon of lake and forest which she had left behind her, the sky above was a gulf of sunshine.
She stepped out of the boat and pushed away the hat to look in her father's face. She saw now who it was that she had rescued. Toyner stirred a little when she touched him, and opened his eyes, the same grave grey eyes with which he had looked at her when he bade her good-bye. There was no fever in them, and, as it seemed to her, no lack of sense and thought. Yet he only looked at her gravely, and then seemed to sleep again.
The girl sprang upright upon the bank and wrung her hands together. It came to her with sudden clearness what had been done. Had Toyner told his tale, she could hardly have known it more clearly. Her father, had tried to murder Bart; her father had tied him in his own place; it was her father who had escaped alone with the boat. It was he himself, and no apparition, who had peered in upon her through the window. She was wrought up into a strong glow of indignation against the baseness that would turn upon a deliverer, against the cruelty of the revenge taken. No wonder that miserable father had not dared to enter her house again or to seek further succour from her! All her pity, all the strength of her generosity, went out to the man who had ventured so much on his behalf and been betrayed. That unspoken reverence for Toyner, a sense of the contrast between him and her father and the other men whom she knew, which had been growing upon her, now culminated in an impulse of devotion. A new faculty opened within her nature, a new mine of wealth.
The thin white-faced man that lay half dead in the bottom of the canoe perhaps experienced some reviving influence from this new energy of love that had transformed the woman who stood near him, for he opened his eyes again and saw her, this time quite distinctly, standing looking down upon him. There was tenderness in her eyes, and her sunbrowned face was all aglow with a flush that was brighter than the flush of physical exercise. About her bending figure grew what seemed to Bart's half-dazzled sense the flowers of paradise, for wild sunflowers and sheafs of purple eupatorium brushed her arms, standing in high phalanx by the edge of the creek. Bart smiled as he looked, but he had no thoughts, and all that he felt was summed up in a word that he uttered gently:
"Ann!"
She knelt down at once. "What is it, Bart?" and again: "What were you trying to say?"