The patient experimenting with the chips was a terrible ordeal to Ann.  The man whom she supposed to be her father lay almost the whole length of the canoe so close to her, and yet she could not pass his outstretched feet to give him food or stimulant.  At last, at last, to her great joy, she found the place where the chips floated outward with steady motion.  She then pushed her canoe in among the trees, thankful to know that it, at least, had been there before, that there would be no pass too narrow for it.  The canoe itself was almost like a living creature to her by this time.  Like an intelligent companion in the search, it responded with gentle motion to her slightest touch.

It seemed to Ann that the light of the moon was now growing very strong and clear.  Surely no moon had ever before become so bright!  Ann looked about her, almost for a moment dreading some supernatural thing, and then she realised that the night was gone, that pale dawn was actually smiling upon her.  It gave her a strange sense of lightheartedness.  Her heart warmed with love to the sight of the purple tint in the eastern sky, that bluish purple which precedes the yellow sunrise.  On either side of her boat now the water was so shallow that sedge and rushes rose above it.

The herons flapped across her path to their morning fishing.

The creek still made a narrow channel for the canoe.  Pretty soon its current flowed between wild undulating tracts of bright green moss in which the trees still stood dead, but bark and lichen now adhered to their trunks, and a few more strokes brought her to the fringes of young spruce and balsam that grew upon the drier knolls.  She smelt living trees, dry woods and pastures in front.  Then a turn of the narrow creek, and she saw a log-house standing not twenty paces from the stream.  Above and around it maples and elms held out green branches, and there was some sort of a clearing farther on.

Ann felt exultant in her triumph.  She had brought her boat to a place of safety.  She seemed to gather life and strength from the sun; although it still lay below the blue horizon of lake and forest which she had left behind her, the sky above was a gulf of sunshine.

She stepped out of the boat and pushed away the hat to look in her father’s face.  She saw now who it was that she had rescued.  Toyner stirred a little when she touched him, and opened his eyes, the same grave grey eyes with which he had looked at her when he bade her good-bye.  There was no fever in them, and, as it seemed to her, no lack of sense and thought.  Yet he only looked at her gravely, and then seemed to sleep again.