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