"Now let us ease up," Corliss advised, as they slipped into an eddy and
drifted with the back-tide under the great wall of rim-ice.
"Who would think it mid-May?" She glanced up at the carelessly poised
cakes. "Does it seem real to you, Vance?"
He shook his head.
"Nor to me. I know that I, Frona, in the flesh, am here, in a
Peterborough, paddling for dear life with two men; year of our Lord
eighteen hundred and ninety-eight, Alaska, Yukon River; this is water,
that is ice; my arms are tired, my heart up a few beats, and I am
sweating,--and yet it seems all a dream. Just think! A year ago I was
in Paris!" She drew a deep breath and looked out over the water to the
further shore, where Jacob Welse's tent, like a snowy handkerchief,
sprawled against the deep green of the forest. "I do not believe there
is such a place," she added. "There is no Paris."
"And I was in London a twelvemonth past," Corliss meditated. "But I
have undergone a new incarnation. London? There is no London now. It
is impossible. How could there be so many people in the world? This
is the world, and we know of fact that there are very few people in it,
else there could not be so much ice and sea and sky. Tommy, here, I
know, thinks fondly of a place he calls Toronto. He mistakes. It
exists only in his mind,--a memory of a former life he knew.
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