n another long silence, and soon he felt the lady leaning more
heavily against him. The head drooped and he knew she slumbered. Having
no wish to disturb her, he sat for a while without moving, and watched
the moon and thought delectable thoughts of the creature by his side.
And as his thoughts, involuntarily, and in an amiable spirit, travelled
back to Father Burke, he smiled as he pictured quite a different
expression on the face of the priest when he should learn what had
happened. And the smile seemed reflected in the radiant countenance of
the big, round moon mounting slowly in the heavens. She appeared to beam
approval upon him and upon the precious burden he supported. But with
the drowsiness which soon came stealing over him he saw--or dreamed he
saw--out in the glistening path of light between the moon and him, not
far from where he sat, an object like a human face, upturned, moving
gently with the waves. And mingling among the quivering moonbeams around
the head was a silvery halo that might be the hair of Father Burke; for
the face resembled his.

Pats was startled and became wide awake. Even then, he thought he had a
glimpse of the face with its silver hair, as it drifted out of the bar
of light into the darkness, slowly, toward the sea.

[Illustration]

XI

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

There came, with August, a perceptible shortening of the days. Cooler
nights gave warning that the brief Canadian summer was nearing its end.

Pats labored on the raft, but the work was long. A float that would bear
in safety two people down the river's current--and possibly out to
sea--demanded size and strength and weight. Felling trees, trimming
logs, and steering them down the river to the "ship-yard," proved a
slower undertaking than had been foreseen. But nobody complained. The
air they breathed and the life they led were in themselves annihilators
of despair. It was an exhilarating, out-of-door life,--a life of love
and labor and of ecstatic repose.

Both Elinor and Pats were up with the sun, and the days were never too
long. To them it mattered little whether the evenings were long or short
or cold or warm, for by the time the dishes were washed and the chores
were done, they became too sleepy to be of interest to each other. And
when the lady retired to her own chamber behind the tapestries, Pats, at
his end of the cottage, always whistled gently or broke the silence in
one way or another as a guarantee of dista