Augusta Maturity spent an agonized, sleepless night, a prey of many emotions; of self-reproach, seeing now that she had been wrong in not telling Brooks Insall of the girl’s secret; of sorrow and sympathy for him; of tenderness toward the girl, despite the suffering she had brought; of unwonted rebellion against a world that cheated her of this cherished human tie for which she had longed the first that had come into her life since her husband and child had gone.  And there was her own responsibility for Insall’s unhappiness—­when she recalled with a pang her innocent sayings that Janet was the kind of woman he, an artist, should marry!  And it was true—­if he must marry.  He himself had seen it.  Did Janet love him? or did she still remember Ditmar?  Again and again, during the summer that followed, this query was on her lips, but remained unspoken....

The next day Insall disappeared.  No one knew where he had gone, but his friends in Silliston believed he had been seized by one of his sudden, capricious fancies for wandering.  For many months his name was not mentioned between Augusta Maturity and Janet.  By the middle of June they had gone to Canada....

In order to reach the camp on Lac du Sablier from the tiny railroad station at Saint Hubert, a trip of some eight miles up the decharge was necessary.  The day had been when Augusta Maturity had done her share of paddling and poling, with an habitant guide in the bow.  She had foreseen all the needs of this occasion, warm clothes for Janet, who was wrapped in blankets and placed on cushions in the middle of a canoe, while she herself followed in a second, from time to time exclaiming, in a reassuring voice, that one had nothing to fear in the hands of Delphin and Herve, whom she had known intimately for more than twenty years.  It was indeed a wonderful, exciting, and at moments seemingly perilous journey up the forested aisle of the river:  at sight of the first roaring reach of rapids Janet held her breath—­so incredible did it appear that any human power could impel and guide a boat up the white stairway between the boulders!  Was it not courting destruction?  Yet she felt a strange, wild delight in the sense of danger, of amazement at the woodsman’s eye that found and followed the crystal paths through the waste of foam....  There were long, quiet stretches, hemmed in by alders, where the canoes, dodging the fallen trees, glided through the still water...  No such silent, exhilarating motion Janet had ever known.  Even the dipping paddles made no noise, though sometimes there was a gurgle, as though a fish had broken the water behind them; sometimes, in the shining pools ahead, she saw the trout leap out.  At every startling flop Delphin would exclaim:  “Un gros!” From an upper branch of a spruce a kingfisher darted like an arrow into the water, making a splash like a falling stone.  Once, after they had passed through the breach of a beaver dam, Herve nodded his head toward a mound of twigs by the bank and muttered something.  Augusta Maturin laughed.