When at last he cast a furtive glance at Eva’s cot, she was not there.  She often slipped out in the early morning to drench herself with dew.  Once he had discovered her stooping on the sand, washing soiled clothes in the lake.  She clapped and rubbed the garments between soap and her little fists.  The sun was just coming up in the far northeast.  Shapes of mist gyrated slowly upward in the distance, and all the morning birds were rushing about, full of eager business.  Eva stopped her humming song when she saw him, and laughed over her unusual employment.  The first time she ever washed clothes in her life she wanted to have Magog for her tub and accomplish the labor on a vast and princess-like scale.  Adam helped her spread the wet things on bushes, and they both marvelled at the bleached dazzle which the sun gave to those garments.

He did not move from the cot, hoping awhile that she might come in, dew-footed, and yet kiss him.  That clear shining of the face which one sometimes observes in pure-minded devotees, or in young mothers over their firstborn, gave him a look of nobility in the pallid shadow of the tent.

He thought of all their days on the island, and, incidentally, of Louis Satanette’s frequent comings.  The Frenchman was a beautiful, versatile fellow.  He sailed a boat, he swam, he fished knowingly, he sang like an angel, leaning his head back against a tree to let the moonlight touch up his ivory face and silky moustache and eyebrows.  He had firm, marble-white fingers, nicely veined, on which reckless exposure to sun and wind had no effect, and the kindliest blue eyes that ever beamed equal esteem upon man and woman.  Sometimes this Satanette came in a blue-flannel suit, the collar turned well back from the throat, and in a broad straw hat wound with pink and white tarlatan.  He looked like a flower,—­if any flower ever expressed along with its beauty the powerful nerve of manliness.

Frequently he sailed out from Magog House and stayed all night on the island, slinging his own hammock between trees.  Then he and Adam rose early and trolled for lunge in deep water under the cliff.  In the afternoon they all plunged into the lake, Eva swimming like a cardinal-flower afloat.  Adam was careful to keep near her, and finally to help her into the boat, where she sat with her scarlet bathing-dress shining in the sun and her drenched hair curling in an arch around her face.

All these days flashed before Adam while he put a slow foot out on the tent-rug.

There was nobody about the camp when he had made his morning toilet and unclosed the tent-flaps, so he built a fire in the stove, hung the bedding to sun, and set out the cots.  A blueness which was not humid filtered itself through the air everywhere, and fold upon fold of it seemed rising from invisible censers on the mainland.

Eva hailed him from the lake.  She came rowing across the sun’s track.  The water was fresh and blue, glittering like millions of alternately dull and burnished scales.