From this I passed to wondering what was truly now my hope or my despair. During all my talk with Yvonne—from the moment, indeed, when Father Fafard had told me of her agitation over Anderson’s peril—I had been as one without hope, in darkness utterly. Only a great love—_the_ great love, as I had told myself—could inspire this desperate and daring solicitude. And against the one great love, in such a woman as Yvonne, I well knew that nothing earthly could prevail. My own bold resolution had been formed on the theory that her betrothal was but the offspring of expediency upon respect. Now, however, either the remembrance of her touch deluded me or something in her attitude upon the wharf held significance, for assuredly I began to dream that remorse rather than love might have been the mainspring of her agitation; remorse, and pity, and something of that strange mother passion which a true woman may feel toward a man who stirs within her none of the lover passion at all. I thought, too, of the wild sense of dishonour she must feel, believing me a traitor and herself my dupe. Strange comfort this, of a surety! Yet I grasped at it. I would prove her no dupe, myself no traitor; and stand at last where I had stood before, with perhaps some advantage. And my rival—he, I swore, should owe his life to me; a kind but cruel kind of revenge. At last, my heart beating uncomfortably from the too swift self-chasing of my thoughts, I stood up, shook myself, and looked about me. We had rounded the bluff, and were standing up the broad Piziquid straight before the wind; and the boat was pitching hotly in the short seas where the wind thwarted the tide. I glanced at Nicole’s face. It was as plaintively placid as if he dreamed of the days when he leaned at his mother’s knee. But the expression of his countenance changed; for now, from out the shadowed face of the bluff, came that bell-like, boding cry— “Woe, woe to Acadie the Fair, for the hour of her desolation is at hand!” Nicole looked awed. “He knows, that Grûl!” he muttered. “It’s coming quick now, I’ll be bound!” “Well, so are we, Nicole!” I rejoined cheerfully; “and that’s what most concerns me at this moment.” I peered eagerly ahead, but could not, in that deluding light, discriminate the mouth of the Kenneticook stream from its low adjacent shores. Presently the waves and pitching lessened. The ebb had ceased, and the near shore slipped by more rapidly. The slack of tide lasted but a few minutes. Then the flood set in—noisily and with a great front of foam, as it does in that river of high tides; and the good boat sped on at a pace that augured accomplishment. In what seemed to me but a few minutes the mouth of the Kenneticook opened, whitely glimmering, before us. Barely had I descried it when Nicole put the helm up sharp and ran straight in shore. “What are you doing, man?” I cried, in astonishment. “You’ll have us aground!”