Even then he might have desisted.  For although the moon, by this time high aloft behind his right shoulder, shone fair along the waterway to the Island, the grey mass of which loomed up like the body of a sea-monster anchored and asleep in the offing, he soon discovered that his own strength would never suffice to drive the boat so far.  But almost on the moment of this discovery he made two others; the first, that the tide—­or, as he supposed it, the current—­set down and edged the boat at every stroke a little towards the Island, which lay, in fact, well down to the westward of the cove, and by half a mile perhaps; the second, that out here a breeze, hitherto imperceptible, was blowing steadily off the land.  He considered this for a while, and then ordered Tilda, who by this time was shivering with cold, to pull up the V-shaped bottom-board covering the well in the stern and fix it upright in the bows.  She did this obediently, and, so placed, it acted as a diminutive sail.

Seeing that she still shivered, he commanded her to take the other oar, seat herself on a thwart forward, and do her best to work it as they had seen the farm-hands pulling after the stag.  Again she obeyed, and he fixed the thole-pins for her, and lifted the oar into place between them.  But with the first stroke she missed the water altogether, and with the next caught a crab, which checked the boat dead.  This would never do; so, and still to busy her and keep her warm with exercise, rather than in hope of help from her, he instructed her to stand with her face to the bows, and push with the oar as she had seen him pushing.

He expected very little from this; but Tilda somehow caught the knack after a few strokes, and for half a mile it helped them greatly.  By this time they were both warm enough, but desperately tired.  So far as they could judge, half of the distance was accomplished.  They could certainly not work back against the breeze blowing more and more freshly off the land.

With a little steering on the boy’s part they might even have trusted to this breeze to carry them the rest of the way, had it not been for the ebb tide.  This too had steadily increased in strength, and now, unless a miracle happened, would sweep them far to the westward of their goal.  Hitherto they had been working their oars one on each side of the boat.  Now Tilda shifted hers across, and they pushed together; but all in vain.  The tide steadily forced them sideways.  They were drifting past the westernmost end of the Island, and the Island still lay more than a mile off.

For the next ten minutes neither spoke; and it may stand to Tilda’s credit that she uttered no reproach at all.  At slow intervals she lifted the oar and pushed with it; but she had none of the boy’s native instinct for managing it, and her strokes grew feebler.  At length she lifted the heavy shaft a little way, and let it fall with a thud on the gunwale.  She could do no more, and the face she turned to him in the moonlight was white with fatigue.