As his fervour took hold of him he left the sweep to do its own steering, and strode up and down the raft, picking his way from balk to balk, skipping aside now and again as the water rose between them under his weight and overflowed his shoes. To Myra, unaccustomed to be prayed for aloud and by name, the whole performance was absurd and embarrassing. She blushed hotly under the eyes of the other men, and glanced at Clem, expecting him to be no less perturbed. But Clem did not hear. The two children had taken off their boots, and he sat with the water playing over his naked insteps and his eyes turned southward to the horizon as if indeed he saw. With his blind gaze fastened there he seemed to wait patiently until Billy's prayer exhausted itself and Billy returned to the steering; and then his lips too began to move, and he broke into a curious song. It frightened Myra, who had never heard the like of it; for it had no words, but was just a sing-song--a chant, low at first, then rising shrill and clear and strong, and reaching out as though to challenge the waters twinkling between raft and horizon. Through it there ran a note of high courage touched with tremulous yearning--yearning to escape yonder and be free. She touched his hand. So well she loved and understood him, that even this strange outbreak she could interpret, though it caught her at unawares. For the moment he did not feel the touch; he was far away. He had forgotten her--alas!--with his blindness. She belonged to his weakness, not to his strength. For the while he dwelt in the vision of his true manhood, which only his one infirmity forbade his inheriting; and she had no place in it. He came back to reality with a pitiful break and quaver of the voice, and turned his eyes helplessly toward her. She answered his gaze timidly, as though he could see her. She was searching his eyes for tears. But there was no trace of tears in them. He took the food she handed him from Aunt Purchase's basket; and, having eaten, laid his head in her lap and fell asleep. Slowly under the noonday heat and through the long afternoon the two rafts moved across the bay, towing each its boat in which the rafters would return in the cool of the evening. But the children did not return in them; for on the quay, where the balks were due, to be warped ashore unlashed and conveyed inland to the mines, stood Jim Tregay waiting with their grandfather's blood-mare Actress harnessed in a spring-cart. How came Jim here, at this distance from home? "Been waiting for you these two hours!" he called to the children. "Jump into the boat there and come ashore. You'm wanted to home, and at once!" CHAPTER VII. THE HEIRS OF HALL. They landed and clambered into the spring-cart. "Nothing wrong at home, I hope?" called Tom Trevarthen from the quay's edge, as he pushed off to scull back to the raft.