It was not until a steamer crossed his bows, not more than a hundred yards in front of him, that he began to appreciate his safety.  Under the protection of the dark, and in the wide loneliness of the waters, he was as lost to human sight as a bird in the upper air.  The steamer—­zigzagging down the lake, touching at little ports now on the west bank and now on the east—­had shot out unexpectedly from behind a point, her double row of lights casting a halo in which his canoe must have been visible on the waves; and yet she had passed by and taken no note of him.  For a second such good-fortune had seemed to his nervous imagination beyond the range of hope.  He stopped paddling he almost stopped breathing, allowing the canoe to rock gently on the tide.  The steamer puffed and pulsated, beating her way directly athwart his course.  The throbbing of her engines seemed scarcely louder than that of his own heart.  He could see people moving on the deck, who in their turn must have been able to see him.  And yet the boat went on, ignoring him, in tacit acknowledgment of his right to the lake, of his right to the world.

His sigh of relief became almost a laugh as he began again to paddle forward.  The incident was like a first victory, an assurance of victories to come.  The sense of insecurity with whith he had started out gave place, minute by minute, to the confidence in himself which was part of his normal state of mind.  Other small happenings confirmed his self-reliance.  Once a pleasure party in a rowboat passed so near him that he could hear the splash of their oars and the sound of their voices.  There was something almost miraculous to him in being so close to the commonplace of human fellowship.  He had the feeling of pleasant inward recognition that comes from hearing one’s mother-tongue in a foreign land.  He stopped paddling again, just to catch meaningless fragments of their talk, until they floated away into silence and darkness.  He would have been sorry to have them pass out of ear-shot, were it not for his satisfaction in being able to go his way unheeded.

On another occasion he found himself within speaking distance of one of the numerous small lakeside hotels.  Lights flared from open doors and windows, while from the veranda, the garden, and the little pier came peals of laughter, or screams and shouts of young people at rough play.  Now and then he could catch the tones of some youth’s teasing, and the shrill, pretended irritation of a girl’s retort.  The noisy cheerfulness of it all reached his ears with the reminiscent tenderness of music heard in childhood.  It represented the kind of life he himself had loved.  Before the waking nightmare of his troubles began he had been of the unexacting type of American lad who counts it a “good time” to sit in summer evenings on “porches” or “stoops” or “piazzas,” joking with “the boys,” flirting with “the girls,” and chattering on all subjects from the silly to the serious, from the local to the sublime.