Silently and swiftly they gathered together the few necessities of a sudden journey, stole out of the quiet building and hurried away to a livery stable.  In a few moments they were rattling down the rough cobble-stone pavement to the river.  The ferryman, who had been retained for this very purpose, pretended to be asleep.  They aroused him, drove onto the platform of his primitive craft and floated out upon the stream.  As the boat swung clear of the shore they heard music issuing from the cabin windows of a steamer under whose stern they were passing.  It was the “Mary Ann.”  They listened.  The music ceased for a moment and a deep voice called out “B-b-bravo!  Another song!”

They recognized it instantly, and Pepeeta pressed close to the side of her lover.

“You hear it for the last time,” he whispered.

“Thank God,” she said.

That name uttered in the darkness of the night startled him.  The idea that he had cast a shuttle of crime into the great loom upon which the fabric of his life was being woven, took complete possession of his mind.  With unerring prescience, he saw that it began to be entangled in the mysterious meshes.  A consciousness that he was no longer the master but the victim of his destiny seized him and he shuddered.  Pepeeta perceived the shudder through the arm which embraced her.

“You are cold, my love,” she said.

“My joy has made me tremble,” he replied.

She pressed the hand which was holding hers and looked up into his face with ineffable love.

The swift current seized the boat, twisting it hither and thither till it seemed to the now trembling fugitive a symbol of the stream of tendencies upon which he had launched the frail bark containing their united lives.

“I wonder if I am strong enough to stem it?” he asked himself.

Pepeeta continued to press his hand and that gentle sign of love revived his drooping courage.  Perhaps there is no other act so full of reassuring power as the pressure of a human hand.  Neither a glance from the eye nor a word from the lips can equal it.  The fainting pilgrim, the departing friend, the discouraged toiler, the returning prodigal welcome it beyond all other symbols of helpfulness or love, and the dying saint who leans the hardest on the “rod and the staff of God” as he goes down into the dark valley finds a comfort scarcely less sweet in the warm clasp of a human hand.  Just as the courage of this daring navigator of the sea of crime had been restored by this signal of his loved one’s trust, the boat grated on the beach.

“Can we find a minister who will marry us at this time of night?” David said to the ferryman, although he had been careful to ask this question before.

“Two blocks south and three east, second door on the right hand side,” he answered laconically, as he received the fare.

Such adventurers passed often through his hands and their ways were nothing new.