“I shan’t have,” she said, hastily, “but I’ll remember what you say.”

“Thanks; that’s all I ask.  For the present I can only hope for the chance of making my promise good.”

She said nothing in reply, and after a minute’s silence he entered the canoe.  She steadied it herself to allow him to step in.  It was not till he had done so and had knelt down with the paddle in his hand that, moved by a sudden impulse she leaned to him and kissed him.  Then, releasing the light craft, she allowed it to glide out like a swan on the tiny bay.  In three strokes of the paddle it had passed between the low, enclosing headlands and was out of sight.  When she summoned up strength to creep to an eminence commanding the lake, it was already little more than a speck, moving rapidly northward, over the opal-tinted waters.

VI

On finding himself alone, and relatively free, Ford’s first sensation was one of insecurity.  Having lived for more than a year under orders and observation, he had lost for the moment some of his natural confidence in his own initiative.  Though he struck resolutely up the lake he was aware of an inner bewilderment, bordering on physical discomfort, at being his own master.  For the first half-hour he paddled mechanically, his consciousness benumbed by the overwhelming strangeness.  As far as he was able to formulate his thought at all he felt himself to be in process of a new birth, into a new phase of existence.  In the darkening of the sky above him and of the lake around there came upon him something of the mental obscurity that might mark the passage of a transmigrating soul.  After the subdued excitement of the past weeks, and especially of the past hour, the very regularity of his movements now lulled him into a passivity only quickened by vague fears.  The noiseless leaping forward of the canoe beneath him heightened his sense of breaking with the past and hastening onward into another life.  In that life he would be a new creature, free to be a law unto himself.

A new creature!  A law unto himself!  The ideas were subconscious, and yet he found the words framing themselves on his lips.  He repeated them mentally with some satisfaction as a cluster of lights on his left told him he was passing Greenport.  Other lights, on a hill, above the town and away from it, were probably those of Judge Wayne’s villa.  He looked at them curiously, with an odd sense of detachment, of remoteness, as from things belonging to a time with which he had nothing more to do.  That was over and done with.