the balance, and his recent despair smote him with shame. He no longer
fiercely protested against the injuries of fortune, but entreated pardon
and pity for the sake of his love.

The clouds rolled into distincter masses, and the northwest wind still
hunted them across the sky, until there came, first a tiny rift for a
star, then a gap for a whole constellation, and finally a broad burst of
moonlight. Gilbert now saw that the timber to which he clung was lodged
nearly in the centre of the channel, as the water swept with equal force
on either side of him. Beyond the banks there was a wooded hill on the
left; on the right an overflowed meadow. He was too weak and benumbed to
trust himself to the flood, but he imagined that it was beginning to
subside, and therein lay his only hope.

Yet a new danger now assailed him, from the increasing cold. There was
already a sting of frost, a breath of ice, in the wind. In another hour
the sky was nearly swept bare of clouds, and he could note the lapse of
the night by the sinking of the moon. But he was by this time hardly in
a condition to note anything more. He had thrown himself, face
downwards, on the top of the log, his arms mechanically clasping it,
while his mind sank into a state of torpid, passive suffering, growing
nearer to the dreamy indifference which precedes death. His cloak had
been torn away in the first rush of the inundation, and the wet coat
began to stiffen in the wind, from the ice gathering over it.

The moon was low in the west, and there was a pale glimmer of the coming
dawn in the sky, when Gilbert Potter suddenly raised his head. Above the
noise of the water and the whistle of the wind, he heard a familiar
sound,--the shrill, sharp neigh of a horse. Lifting himself, with great
exertion, to a sitting posture, he saw two men, on horseback, in the