It was past six o’clock, and the August sun had much lessened of its heat, when, as once before with Mr. Landholm for a passenger, the Julia Ann stood out into the middle of the river with her head set for the North.

Mrs. Nettley and Clam hid themselves straightway in the precincts of the cabin.  Elizabeth stood still where she had first placed herself on the deck, in a cold abstracted sort of carelessness, conscious only that her protector was standing by her side, and that she was not willing to lose sight of him.  The vessel, and her crew, and their work before her very eyes, she could hardly be said to see.  The sloop got clear of the wharf and edged out into the mid-channel, where she stood bravely along before the fair wind.  Slowly the trees and houses along shore were dropped behind, and fresher the wind and fairer the green river-side seemed to become.  Elizabeth’s senses hardly knew it, or only in a kind of underhand way; not recognized.

“Will you go into the cabin? or will you have a seat here?” she heard Winthrop say.

Mechanically she looked about for one.  He brought a chair and placed her in it, and she sat down; choosing rather the open air and free sky than any shut-up place, and his neighbourhood rather than where he was not; but with a dulled and impassive state of feeling that refused to take up anything, past, present or future.  It was not rest, it was not relief, though there was a seeming of rest about it.  She knew then it would not last.  It was only a little lull between storms; the enforced quiet of wearied and worn-out powers.  She sat mazily taking in the sunlight, and the view of the sunlighted earth and water, the breath of the sweeping fresh air, the creaking of the sloop’s cordage, in the one consciousness that Winthrop kept his place at her side all this time.  How she thanked him for that! though she could not ask him to sit down, nor make any sort of a speech about it.

Down went the sun, and the shadows and the sunlight were swept away together; and yet fresher came the sweet wind.  It was a sort of consolation to Elizabeth, that her distress gave Winthrop a right and a reason to attend upon her; she had had all along a vague feeling of it, and the feeling was very present now.  It was all of comfort she could lay hold of; and she clutched at it with even then a foreboding sense of the desolation there would be when that comfort was gone.  She had it now; she had it, and she held it; and she sat there in her chair on the deck in a curious half stupor, half quiet, her mind clinging to that one single point where it could lean.