“Away down the river,
        A hundred miles or more,
        Other little children
        Shall bring my boats ashore."...

Janet drew in a great breath, involuntarily.  These were moments when it seemed that she could scarcely contain what she felt of beauty and significance, when the ecstasy and pain were not to be borne.  And sometimes, as she listened to Mrs. Maturin’s voice, she wept in silence.  Again a strange peace descended on her, the peace of an exile come home; if not to remain, at least to know her own land and people before faring forth.  She would not think of that faring yet awhile, but strive to live and taste the present—­and yet as life flowed back into her veins that past arose to haunt her, she yearned to pour it out to her new friend, to confess all that had happened to her.  Why couldn’t she?  But she was grateful because Mrs. Maturin betrayed no curiosity.  Janet often lay watching her, puzzled, under the spell of a frankness, an ingenuousness, a simplicity she had least expected to find in one who belonged to such a learned place as that of Silliston.  But even learning, she was discovering, could be amazingly simple.  Freely and naturally Mrs. Maturin dwelt on her own past, on the little girl of six taken from her the year after her husband died, on her husband himself, once a professor here, and who, just before his last illness, had published a brilliant book on Russian literature which resulted in his being called to Harvard.  They had gone to Switzerland instead, and Augusta Maturin had come back to Silliston.  She told Janet of the loon-haunted lake, hemmed in by the Laurentian hills, besieged by forests, where she had spent her girlhood summers with her father, Professor Wishart, of the University of Toronto.  There, in search of health, Gifford Maturin had come at her father’s suggestion to camp.

Janet, of course, could not know all of that romance, though she tried to picture it from what her friend told her.  Augusta Wishart, at six and twenty, had been one of those magnificent Canadian women who are most at home in the open; she could have carried Gifford Maturinout of the wilderness on her back.  She was five feet seven, modelled in proportion, endowed by some Celtic ancestor with that dark chestnut hair which, because of its abundance, she wore braided and caught up in a heavy knot behind her head.  Tanned by the northern sun, kneeling upright in a canoe, she might at a little distance have been mistaken for one of the race to which the forests and waters had once belonged.  The instinct of mothering was strong in her, and from the beginning she had taken the shy and delicate student under her wing, recognizing in him one of the physically helpless dedicated to a supreme function.  He was forever catching colds, his food disagreed with him, and on her own initiative she discharged his habitant cook and supplied him with one of her own choosing.  When overtaken by one of his indispositions she paddled him about