When he had made the joints of his couch creak with many uneasy turnings, had clinched at leaves, and started up to return to the tent, only to check himself in the act as often as he started, he lost consciousness in uneasy dreams rather than fell asleep.

He was smothering, and yet could not open his lips to gasp for a breath of air.  Then he was drowning:  he gulped in vast sheets of water upon his lungs.  An alarm sounded from Eva’s barricade.  He heard the pans and kettles clanging and her own voice in screams which pierced him, yet he could not move.  A nightmare of heat enveloped him; the smothering element pouring upon his lungs was not water, but smoke; and he knew if no effort of will could move his body to her rescue he must be perishing himself.

After these brief sensations his existence was as blank as the empty void outside the worlds, until his ears began to throb like drums, and he felt water, like the tears he had shed in the morning, running all over his face.  Eva held him in her arms, and alternately kissed his head and drenched it from the lake.

Moreover, he was in the boat, outside the bay, and their island glowed like a furnace before his dazzled eyes.

Those pine woods where he had gone to sleep were roaring up toward heaven in a column of fire.  The tent was burning, all its interior illuminated until every object showed its minutest lines.  He thought he saw some of Eva’s dark hairs in an upturned hair-brush on the wash-stand.

Fire ran along the cliff-edge and dropped hissing brands into the lake.  Old moss logs and pine-trees dry as tinder sent out sickening heat.  The light ran like a flash up the tree over their stove, and in an instant its crown was wavering with flames.  The grass itself caught here and there, and in whatever direction the eye turned, new fires as instantaneously sprang out to meet it.

Stumps blazed up like lighted altars, or like huge gas-jets suddenly turned on.  Adam saw one log lying endwise downhill, one side of which was crumbling into coals of fierce and tremulous heat, while from the other side still sprung unsinged a delicate tuft of ferns.

The smoke was driving straight upward in a quivering current, and in Lake Magog’s depths another island seemed to be on fire.

Sublime as the sight was, all these details impressed themselves on the man in an instant, and he turned his face directly up toward the woman.

“Darling, your face looks blistered,” said Adam.

“It feels blistered,” replied Eva.  “I’ll put some water on it, now that you’ve caught your breath again.  I thought I could not get you out from those burning trees.”

“But you dragged me down the hill?”

“Yes, and then dipped you in the lake and pushed off with you in the boat.  I don’t know how I did it.  But here we are together.”

Adam bathed her face carefully himself, and held her tight in his arms.  The unspeakable love of which he had dreamed, and the heat of the burning island, seemed welding them together without other sign than the fact.