he clinging ooze, and to wonder why
the Indians should halt in such a place. She met her lover's glance, and
saw that he was singularly disturbed.

The place was like a hideous gaping pit. A double winding of the channel
closed it in above and below. Some forty or fifty feet over their heads,
against a pure sky of loveliest blue, waved a shaggy fringe of salt
grasses, yellowing in the autumn air. This harsh and meagre herbage
encircled the rim of the chasm, and seemed to make the outer world of
men infinitely remote. The sun, an hour or two past noon, glared down
whitely into the gulf, and glistened, in a myriad of steely reflections,
from the polished but irregular steeps of slime. There was something so
strange and monstrous in the scene that Margaret's dull misery was
quickened to a nameless horror. Suddenly a voice, which she hardly
recognized as that of her lover, said slowly and steadily:--

"Margaret, this is the end of our journey; we have come to the end."

Looking up she met Crewe's eyes fastened upon her with a gaze which
seemed to sustain her and fill her nerves with strength. With the end of
his uncertainty his will became clear, and his resolution perfect as
tempered steel. An Indian had brought two stakes and thrown them on the
mud at the leader's feet. Margaret looked at the rough-trimmed saplings,
at the tide-mark far up the dreadful slope, then again into her lover's
face. She understood; but she gave no sign, save that her skin blanched
to a more deathly pallor, and she exclaimed in a voice of poignant
regret: "Have we kept silence all these long hours only for this? And I
had so much to say to you!"

"There will be time," he said gently, and his voice was a caress. "The
flood tide has not yet begun, and it will take some hours. And it was
well, dear, that we could not speak; for so you had hope till the last
to support you, while I had none, having heard the Indians say we were
to die, though they said not in my hearing when or how. Had you known
you might not have had this high courage of yours, that now gives _me_
strength to endure the utmost. Dear, your heroic fortitude has been
everything to me."

A faint flush of pride rose into the girl's face, and she stretched out
her pinioned arms to him, and cried: "You shall not be deceived in me. I
will be worthy of you, and will not shame our race before these beasts."

By this time the stakes were driven into the strong clay. They were
placed som