She meant it, and I think her fury would have lasted, and she would have made a great deal more trouble about leaving if an inspiration hadn’t just then come to me. I looked satirical, or at least I tried to, and I think she was too indignant to perceive that it was bad acting.

“I believe I understand,” I said. “Nathaniel’s told you that I’m not going in this boat myself, but design to send you in it with him, while I stay here to get more boats for the rest of the timbers. Well, you may do as you please; but if you stay because you prefer to be near me, I’ll warn you that in spite of my wishing to be as much with you as possible, I’ll be busy most of the time and won’t have the opportunity.”

Her eyes, already wide and round, grew wider and rounder. “Oh,” and she made a long-drawn-out syllable of that exclamation. “Oh! I’ll go!”

Without another word she began to roll her wet clothes into a ball; and an hour later, when I went with Nathaniel to the boat, there she stood at the water’s edge, an angry little figure with a ball of damp clothes in one hand, and a packet of dry ones in the other.

*    *    *

… I said good-bye to her in a gentle voice and received not even a nod in return. She kept her back to me as she got into the boat, and I never saw another human back so eloquent. I would not have believed that merely a back could express all that dislike, all that scorn, and the clear conviction that behind it there stood an insignificant creature so puffed with egregious vanity that the rebuke now being administered to him would probably not improve him.

I watched the boat move off toward Ticonderoga and South Bay, and I foolishly hoped that maybe—just once—before it passed from my sight, Ellen would turn and look back. But she didn’t; and so, after a time, I sighed and set off toward the landing.

I went a little out of my way; in fact, I went to the very spot where Ellen, busy with her knitting, had sat when I had come back with Arnold from Isle aux Noix. The place was pleasant then, I had thought, with its tall elms, and the distant pines marching up the swelling hills behind us; but now it seemed cheerless and somber; colorless and dusty. There was nothing pleasant about it. It was a terrible hole.

… I had help in sending the rest of the timbers to Skenesboro.