y
beginning, apparently. But at the moment I wholly missed the point of his
words about the necessity of there being a victim, and that we ourselves
were destined to satisfy the want. I dropped all pretence thenceforward,
but thenceforward likewise my fear increased steadily to the climax.

"But you're quite right about one thing," he added, before the subject
passed, "and that is that we're wiser not to talk about it, or even to
think about it, because what one thinks finds expression in words, and what
one says, happens."

That afternoon, while the canoe dried and hardened, we spent trying to
fish, testing the leak, collecting wood, and watching the enormous flood of
rising water. Masses of driftwood swept near our shores sometimes, and we
fished for them with long willow branches. The island grew perceptibly
smaller as the banks were torn away with great gulps and splashes. The
weather kept brilliantly fine till about four o'clock, and then for the
first time for three days the wind showed signs of abating. Clouds began to
gather in the south-west, spreading thence slowly over the sky.

This lessening of the wind came as a great relief, for the incessant
roaring, banging, and thundering had irritated our nerves. Yet the silence
that came about five o'clock with its sudden cessation was in a manner
quite as oppressive. The booming of the river had everything in its own way
then; it filled the air with deep murmurs, more musical than the wind
noises, but infinitely more monotonous. The wind held many notes, rising,
falling always beating out some sort of great elemental tune; whereas the
river's song lay between three notes at most--dull pedal notes, that held a
lugubrious quality foreign to the wind, and somehow seemed to me, in my
then nervous state, to sound wonderfully well the music of doom.

It was extraordinary, too, how the withdrawal suddenly of bright sunlight
took everything out of the landscape that made for cheerfulness; and since
this particular landscape had already managed to convey the suggestion of
something sinister, the change of course was all the more unwelcome and
noticeable. For me, I know, the darkening outlook became distinctly more
alarming, and I found myself more than once calculating how soon after
sunset the full moon would get up in the east, and whether the gathering
clouds would greatly interfere with her lighting of the little island.

With this general hush of the wind--though it