When he looked up from his meat sometimes he caught her eyes looking at him. He recognized her superiority of experience and position; she made him feel like a boy, but a boy of whom she was really quite fond, or at least in whom she was interested. For that feeling he was grateful, though there was something in her smile which led him to doubt his own success in veiling or hiding the doubts or qualms which had, unbidden, risen in his thoughts at the equivocal nature of their position. Having dined on the best meal he had had since leaving home, they talked a little while over the remains of the sumptuous repast. But their mood grew silent, and they kept up the conversation with difficulty. "I think I'd better put up my canvas top," he blurted out, and she assented. "And then you must come back and help me wash this awful pile of dishes," she added. "Oh, of course!" he exclaimed. "I'll help with the canvas," she said, and he dared not look at her. By the light of his lantern they put up the canvas to protect the boat from dew. Then they looked around at the night; stars overhead, the strange haze from the countless grains of sand which wavered over the bar, and the river in the dark, running by. They looked at the river together, and they felt its majesty, its power, its resistlessness. "It's overwhelming," he whispered. "When you can't see it you hear it, or you feel it!" "And it makes everything else seem so small, so unimportant, so perfectly negligible," she added, consciously, and then with vivacity: "I'll not make you wipe those dishes, after all. But you must take me for a walk up this sandbar!" "Gladly," he laughed, "but I'll help with the dishes as well!" She put on a jacket, pinned on a cap, and together, in merry mood, they romped up the sandbar. It was all sand; there was not a log of timber, not a drift barrel, not a stick of wood anywhere as far as they could see. But as they walked along every foot of the sandbar was different, wind-rifts, covering long, water-shaped reefs; or rising knolls, like hills, and long depressions which held shadows darker by far than the gloom of the night. They walked along, sometimes yards apart, sometimes side by side. They forgot Ruskin and Carlyle--they remembered Thoreau's "Cape Cod" and talked of the musical sands which they could hear now under their own feet. In the silence they heard river voices; murmurings and tones and rhythms and harmonies; and Terabon, who had accumulated a vast store of information from the shanty-boaters, told her some of the simple superstitions with which the river people beguile themselves and add to the interest and difficulties of their lives.