to have become great pendulums of time. And
before and behind glimmered the eternities, and between the eternities,
ever lifting, ever falling, they pulsed in vast rhythmical movement.
They were no longer humans, but rhythms. They surged in till their
paddles touched the bitter rock, but they did not know; surged out,
where chance piloted them unscathed through the lashing ice, but they
did not see. Nor did they feel the shock of the smitten waves, nor the
driving spray that cooled their faces. . .

La Bijou veered out into the stream, and their paddles, flashing
mechanically in the sunshine, held her to the return angle across the
river. As time and matter came back to them, and Split-up Island
dawned upon their eyes like the foreshore of a new world, they settled
down to the long easy stroke wherein breath and strength may be
recovered.

"A third attempt would have been useless," Corliss said, in a dry,
cracked whisper.

And Frona answered, "Yes; our hearts would have surely broken."

Life, and the pleasant camp-fire, and the quiet rest in the noonday
shade, came back to Tommy as the shore drew near, and more than all,
blessed Toronto, its houses that never moved, and its jostling streets.
Each time his head sank forward and he reached out and clutched the
water with his paddle, the streets enlarged, as though gazing through a
telescope and adjusting to a nearer focus. And each time the paddle
drove clear and his head was raised, the island bounded forward. His
head sank, and the streets were of the size of life; it raised, and
Jacob Welse and the two men stood on the bank three lengths away.

"Dinna I tell ye!" he shouted to them, triumphantly.

But Frona jerked the canoe parallel with the bank, and he found himself
gazing at the long up-stream stretch. He arrested a stroke midway, and
his paddle clattered in the bottom.

"Pick it up!" Corliss's voice was sharp and relentless.

"I'll do naething o' the kind." He turned a rebellious face on his
tormentor, and ground his teeth in anger and disappointment.

The canoe was drifting down with the current, and Frona merely held it
in place. Corliss crawled forward on his knees.

"I don't want to hurt you, Tommy," he said in a low, tense voice, "so
. . . well, just pick it up, that's a good fellow."

"I'll no."

"Then I shall kill you," Corliss went on, in the same calm, passionless
way, at the same time drawing his hunting-knife from its sheath.