“Thank you,” panted Philip Alston.

They reached it together and could now see the shore, and both looked at Ruth through the swaying boughs and flying spray.  The young man’s heart leapt and his courage rose at the sight of the slender, girlish form.  He saw her stretch out her arms, and remembering that she loved this old man, panting and struggling at his side, he shouted with all the power that he had, telling her that he would do his best to bring him to land.  Philip Alston gave him a strange look, and then turned his gaze again toward the little figure on the shore.  In a tone that was even more strange than his look, he murmured something about being on his way back from the island.  He also said something about going to the boat early in the morning to countermand an order that he had given on the night before.

“I changed my mind—­I found I couldn’t do—­”

Paul Colbert did not understand, and scarcely heard the confused, gasping, hurried words.  He was looking at Ruth, and longing to loose his hold on the bough, long enough to wave the assurance that his voice could not carry across the roaring waters.  And this was the instant that Nature chose to mock the pitting of his puny powers against her resistless forces.  A fierce wave tore away the roots that the tree bound to the bank, and hurled it into the flood.  It swung round and turned partly over, burying the bough that they clung to, deep under the water.  Both went down with it and Paul Colbert thought, with the quickness and clearness of mind that comes to the drowning, that they could never come up again.  When he found his own head once more above water, with his hand grasping a bough of a smaller tree, which had been driven close to the shore, he looked round for Philip Alston.  There was no silver head anywhere to be seen now above the thick, dark river.  Half stunned, he gazed again blankly, feeling vaguely that his own head must go down very soon; his strength was wholly gone; he could not even see the shore, though it was very near, because he was not strong enough to lift himself above the trunk of the tree which hid it from his sight.  And then at last he heard Father Orin’s voice:—­

“Hold fast, my boy.  Hold fast just a moment longer.  We are coming, Toby and I. Try to hold on.  We are almost there.”

They reached him as his hand let go and his head sunk, and they bore him to the shore and laid him down at Ruth’s feet, unconscious, but alive.

* * * * *

When Nature has thus rent the trembling earth and thus smitten appalled humanity by some stupendous convulsion, the outburst of passion nearly always passes quickly, and she hastens to console by concealing its traces.  These fatal throes were hardly over before she was quelling the frenzied river by her sudden coldness, and only a few days had passed before she was covering its subdued waters with a heavy white sheet of glittering ice.  And then, as if to make