could not see it, a wonderfully enchanting
experience.

They, too, ran out into the flood of sunshine to float down with the
rest.

At the foot of Brandywine Bar a little cabin-boat suddenly rowed out
into the current and signalled them; somebody recognized and wanted to
speak to the mission boat. They were rapidly sucking down the swift
chute current, but Terabon turned over the motor, and flanked the big
houseboat across the current so that the hail could be answered.

The little cabin-boat, almost lost to view astern, rapidly gained, and
as they ran down Beef Island chute, where the current is slow, they were
overtaken.

"Sho!" Parson Rasba cried aloud, "hit's Missy Carline, Missy Nelia,
shore as I'm borned!"

Terabon had known it for half an hour. He had been noticing river
details, and he could not fail to recognize that little boat. His hands
trembled as he steered the launch to take advantage of slack current and
dead water, and his throat choked with an emotion which he controlled
with difficulty. He looked fearfully at the gaunt River Prophet whose
own cheeks were staining with warm blood, and whose eyes gazed so keenly
at the young woman who was coming, leaning to her sweeps with Viking
grace and abandon.

She was coming to _them_, with the fatalistic certainty that is so
astonishing to the student observer. Carried away by her sottish
husband; threatened by the tornado; rescued, perhaps, by the storm from
worse jeopardy, caught in safety under an island sandbar; her eyes,
sweeping the lonesome breadths of the flowing river-sea, had seen and
recognized her friend's boat, the floating mission, and pulled to join
safe company.

She rowed up, with her eyes on the Prophet. He stood there in his
majesty while Terabon stooped unnoticed in the engine pit of the
motorboat. Not till she had run down near enough to throw a line did she
take her eyes off the mountain parson, and then she turned and looked
into the eyes, dumb with misery, of the other man, Terabon.

Her cheeks, red with her exertions, turned white. Three days she had
read that heap of notes in loose-leaf file which Terabon had written.
She had read the lines and between the lines, facts and ideas,
descriptions and reminiscence, dialogue and history, statistics and
appreciation of a thousand river things, all viewpoints, including her
own.

She knew, now, how wicked she was. She knew, now, the wilfulness of her
sins, and the merciful interpos