them accordingly, whenever interest or caprice
supplied a motive or an impulse. Still, though daunted by these
reproaches, the handsome barbarian could hardly be said to be penitent.
He was too much rebuked by conscience to suffer an outbreak of temper
to escape him, and perhaps he felt that he had already committed an act
that might justly bring his manhood in question. Instead of resenting,
or answering the simple but natural appeal of Hist, he walked away, like
one who disdained entering into a controversy with a woman.

In the mean while the Ark swept onward, and by the time the scene with
the torches was enacting beneath the trees, it had reached the open
lake, Floating Tom causing it to sheer further from the land with a
sort of instinctive dread of retaliation. An hour now passed in gloomy
silence, no one appearing disposed to break it. Hist had retired to her
pallet, and Chingachgook lay sleeping in the forward part of the scow.
Hutter and Hurry alone remained awake, the former at the steering oar,
while the latter brooded over his own conduct, with the stubbornness of
one little given to a confession of his errors, and the secret goadings
of the worm that never dies. This was at the moment when Judith and
Hetty reached the centre of the lake, and had lain down to endeavor to
sleep in their drifting canoe.

The night was calm, though so much obscured by clouds. The season was
not one of storms, and those which did occur in the month of June, on
that embedded water, though frequently violent were always of short
continuance. Nevertheless, there was the usual current of heavy, damp
night air, which, passing over the summits of the trees, scarcely
appeared to descend as low as the surface of the glassy lake, but kept
moving a short distance above it, saturated with the humidity that
constantly arose from the woods, and apparently never proceeding far in
any one direction. The currents were influenced by the formation of the
hills, as a matter of course, a circumstance that rendered even fresh
breezes baffling, and which reduced the feebler efforts of the night
air to be a sort of capricious and fickle sighings of the woods. Several
times the head of the Ark pointed east, and once it was actually turned
towards the south, again; but, on the whole, it worked its way north;
Hutter making always a fair wind, if wind it could be called, his
principal motive appearing to keep in motion, in order to defeat any
treachero