“There is nothin’ left. I am alone. It was the glass. Ah! that the palsy had seized my unlucky hand before I took it from its shelf! How still it is. How clear, too, is my darling’s laugh—it rings through the room—it is a ghost. It will haunt me always, always.”
Unable longer to bear the indoor silence, which her fancy filled with familiar sounds, she unbarred the heavy door and stepped out.
“Ah! is it possible—can the sun be setting that way—as if there had been nothin’ happen?”
Wrecks strewed the open ground about the cabin, poultry coops were washed away, the cow-shed was a heap of ruins, into which the trembling observer dared not peer. That Snowfoot should be dead was a calamity but second only to the loss of master and nursling.
“Ah! my beast, my beauty. The best in all this northern Maine. That the master bought and brought in the big canoe for an Easter gift to his so faithful Angelique. And yet the sun sets as red and calm as if all were the same as ever.”
It was, indeed, a scene of grandeur. The storm, in passing northward, had left scattered banks of clouds, now colored most brilliantly by the setting sun and widely reflected on the once more placid lake. But neither the beauty nor the sweet, rain-washed air, appealed to the distracted islander, who faced the west and shook her hand in impotent rage toward it.
“Shine, will you? With the harm all done and nothin’ left but me, old Angelique. Pouf! I turn my back on you!”
Then she ran shoreward with all speed, dreading what she might find, yet eager to know the worst, if there it might be learned. With her apron over her head, she saw only what lay straight before her, and so passed the Point of Rocks without observing her master lying behind it. But a few steps further she paused, arrested by a sight which turned her numb with superstitious terror. What was that coming over the water? A ghost! a spirit!
Did spirits paddle canoes and sing as this one was singing?
“The boatman’s song is borne along far over the water so blue,