Sylvia went for a wrap, and they had soon embarked, skimming along in silence for a time till they were free of the shores.  There was no moon, but the stars shone brilliantly; a fitful west wind scarcely ruffled the water.  Along the deep-shadowed shores the dock lanterns twinkled, and above and beyond them the lamps of the cottages flashed and vanished.  Dan paddled steadily with a skilled, splashless stroke.  The paddle sank noiselessly and rose to the accompaniment of a tinkling drip as the canoe parted the waters.  There is nothing like a canoe flight under stars to tranquilize a troubled and perplexed spirit, and Dan was soon won to the mood he sought.  It seemed to him that Sylvia, enfolded in the silvery-dim dusk in the bow, was a part of the peace of sky and water.  They were alone, away from the strifes and jars of the world, shut in together as completely as though they had been flung back for unreckoned ages into a world of unbroken calm.  The peace that Wordsworth sought and sang crept into their blood, and each was sensible that the other knew and felt it and that it was grateful to them both.

Sylvia spoke, after a time, of immaterial things, or answered his questions as to the identity of the constellations mapped in the clear arch above.

“I dream sometimes of another existence,” she said, “as I suppose every one does, when I knew a quiet lake that held the stars as this does.  I even think I remember how it looked in winter, with the ice gleaming in the moonlight, and of snow coming and the keen winds piling it in drifts.  It’s odd, isn’t it? those memories we have that are not memories.  The metempsychosis idea must have some substance.  We have all been somebody else sometime, and we clutch at the shadows of our old selves, hardly believing they are shadows.”

“It’s a good deal a matter of imagination, isn’t it?” asked Dan, idling with the paddle.

“Oh, but I haven’t a bit of that.  That’s one thing I’m not troubled with, and I’m sorry for it.  When I look up at the stars I think of the most hideous formula for calculating their distances from the earth.  When I read in a novel that it was a night of stars, I immediately wonder what particular stars.  It used to make dear Grandfather Kelton furiously indignant to find a moon appearing in novels contrary to the almanac; he used to check up all the moons, and he once thought of writing a thesis on the ’Erroneous Lunar Calculations of Recent Novelists,’ but decided that it didn’t really make any difference.  And of course it doesn’t.”

As they discussed novels new and old, he drew in his paddle and crept nearer her.  It seemed to him that all the influences of earth and heaven had combined to create this hour for him.  To be talking to her of books that interpreted life and of life itself was in itself something sweet; he wished such comradeship as this, made possible by their common interests in the deep, surging currents of the century in which they lived, to go on forever.