are tired, my heart up a few beats, and I am
sweating,--and yet it seems all a dream. Just think! A year ago I was
in Paris!" She drew a deep breath and looked out over the water to the
further shore, where Jacob Welse's tent, like a snowy handkerchief,
sprawled against the deep green of the forest. "I do not believe there
is such a place," she added. "There is no Paris."

"And I was in London a twelvemonth past," Corliss meditated. "But I
have undergone a new incarnation. London? There is no London now. It
is impossible. How could there be so many people in the world? This
is the world, and we know of fact that there are very few people in it,
else there could not be so much ice and sea and sky. Tommy, here, I
know, thinks fondly of a place he calls Toronto. He mistakes. It
exists only in his mind,--a memory of a former life he knew. Of
course, he does not think so. That is but natural; for he is no
philosopher, nor does he bother--"

"Wheest, will ye!" Tommy fiercely whispered. "Your gabble'll bring it
doon aboot oor heads."

Life is brief in the Northland, and fulfilment ever clutters the heels
of prophecy. A premonitory tremor sighed down the air, and the rainbow
wall swayed above them. The three paddles gripped the water with
common accord. La Bijou leaped out from under. Broadside after
broadside flared and crashed, and a thousand frigid tons thundered down
behind them. The displaced water surged outward in a foamy, upstanding
circle, and La Bijou, striving wildly to rise, ducked through the stiff
overhang of the crest and wallowed, half-full, in the trough.

"Dinna I tell ye, ye gabbling fules!"

"Sit still, and bail!" Corliss checked him sharply. "Or you'll not
have the comfort of telling us anything."

He shook his head at Frona, and she winked back; then they both
chuckled, much like children over an escapade which looks disastrous
but turns out well.

Creeping timidly under the shadow of the impending avalanches, La Bijou
slipped noiselessly up the last eddy. A corner of the bluff rose
savagely from the river--a monstrous mass of naked rock, scarred and
battered of the centuries; hating the river that gnawed it ever; hating
the rain that graved its grim face with unsightly seams; hating the sun
that refused to mate with it, whereof green life might come forth and
hide its hideousness. The whole force of the river hurled in against
it, waged furious war along its battlements, a