Her head was raised again then, and with a good will the oars made the little boat go over the water.  She was elated to find her arms so strong, stronger now than they had been five minutes ago; and she took her way down towards the bottom of the bay, where once she had gone huckleberrying, and where a rich growth of wood covered the banks and shewed in one or two of its members here and there already a touch of frost.  Here and there an orange or reddish branch of maple leaves —­ a yellow-headed butternut, partly bare —­ a ruddying dogwood or dogwood’s family connection, —­ a hickory shewing suspicions of tawny among its green.  A fresh and rich wall-side of beauty the woody bank was.  Elizabeth pulled slowly along, coasting the green wilderness, exulting in her freedom and escape from all possible forms of home annoyance and intrusion; but that exulting, only a very sad break in a train of weary and painful thoughts and remembrances.  It was the only break to them; for just then sorrowful things had got the upper hand; and even the Bible promises to which she had clung, and the faith that laid hold of them, and the hopes that grew out of them, could not make her be other than downcast and desponding.  Even a Christian life, all alone in the world, with nobody and for nobody, seemed desolate and uncheering.  Winthrop Landholm led such a life, and was not desolate, nor uncheered. —­ “But he is very different from me; he has been long a traveller on the road where my unsteady feet have but just set themselves; he is a man and I am a woman!” —­ And once Elizabeth even laid down her oars, and her head upon the hands that had held them, to shed the tears that would have their own peculiar way of comfort and relief.  The bay, and the boat, and the woody shore, and the light, and the time of year, all had too much to say about her causes of sorrow.  But tears wrought their own relief; and again able to bear the burden of life, Elizabeth pulled slowly and quietly homewards.

Looking behind her as she neared the rocks, to make sure that she was approaching them in a right direction, she was startled to see a man’s figure standing there.  Startled, because it was not the bent-shouldered form of Mr. Underhill, nor the slouching habit of Anderese; but tall, stately and well put on.  It was too far to see the face; and in her one startled look Elizabeth did not distinctly recognize anything.  Her heart gave a pang of a leap at the possibility of its being Winthrop; but she could not tell whether it were he or no; she could not be sure that it was, yet who else should come there with that habit of a gentleman?  Could Mr. Brick? —­ No, he had never such an air, oven at a distance.  It was not Mr. Brick.  Neither was it Mr. Herder; Mr. Herder was too short.  Every nerve now trembled, and her arms pulled nervously and weakly her boat to the shore.  When might she look again?  She did not till she must; then her look went first to the rocks, with a vivid impression of that dark figure standing above them, seen and not seen —­ she guided her boat in carefully —­ then just grazing the rocks she looked up.  The pang and the start came again, for though not Winthrop it was Winthrop’s brother.  It was Rufus.