Then the wild impulse of defiance passed, and the awful sense of bereavement came back like the falling of darkness over a sinking flame. Cecil was gone from her, gone for all time. The world seemed unreal, empty. She sunk among the furs like one stricken down. Snoqualmie, recovering from his momentary rebuff, heaped bitter epithets and scornful words upon her; but she neither saw nor heard, and lay with wide, bright, staring eyes. Her seeming indifference maddened him still more, and he hurled at her the fiercest abuse. She looked at him vaguely. He saw that she did not even know what he was saying, and relapsed into sullen silence. She lay mute and still, with a strained expression of pain in her eyes. The canoe sped swiftly on. One desolating thought repeated itself again and again,--the thought of hopeless and irreparable loss. By it past and present were blotted out. By and by, when she awoke from the stupor of despair and realized her future, destined to be passed with the murderer of her lover, what then? But now she was stunned with the shock of a grief that was mercy compared with the awakening that must come. They were in the heart of the Cascade Mountains, and a low deep roar began to reach their ears, rousing and startling all but Wallulah. It was the sound of the cascades, of the new cataract formed by the fall of the Great Bridge. Rounding a bend in the river they came in sight of it. The mighty arch, the long low mountain of stone, had fallen in, damming up the waters of the Columbia, which were pouring over the sunken mass in an ever-increasing volume. Above, the river, raised by the enormous dam, had spread out like a lake, almost submerging the trees that still stood along the former bank. Below the new falls the river was comparatively shallow, its rocky bed half exposed by the sudden stoppage of the waters. The Indians gazed with superstitious awe on the vast barrier over which the white and foaming waters were pouring. The unwonted roar of the falls, a roar that seemed to increase every moment as the swelling waters rushed over the rocks; the sight of the wreck of the mysterious bridge, foreshadowing the direst calamities,--all this awed the wild children of the desert. They approached the falls slowly and cautiously. A brief command from Snoqualmie, and they landed on the northern side of the river, not far from the foot of the falls. There they must disembark, and the canoes be carried around the falls on the shoulders of Indians and launched above.