Of course Harold wished to take the entire family home with him at once, and would hear to nothing else until Hannah, serving black coffee to him from her furnace, in the dawn, begged that she and Israel might have "a few days to rest an' to study" before moving.
It was on the second evening following this, at nightfall, while her man was away in his boat, that the old woman rose from her chair and, first studying the heavens and then casting about her to see that no one was near, she went down to the water, slowly picking her way to a shallow pool between the rafts and the shore. She sat here at first, upon the edge of the bank, frankly dropping her feet into the water while she seemed to begin to talk--or possibly she sang, for the low sound which only occasionally rose above the small noises of the rafts was faintly suggestive of a priest's intoning.
For a moment only, she sat thus. Then she began to lower herself into the water, until, leaning, she could lay her face against the sod, so that a wave passed over it, and when, letting her weight go, she subsided, with arms extended, into the shallow pool, a close listener might have heard an undulating song, so like the river's in tone as to be separable from it only through the faint suggestion of words, interrupted or drowned at intervals by the creaking and knocking of the rafts and the gurgling of the sucking eddies about them.
The woman's voice--song, speech, or what not?--_seemed_ intermittent, as if in converse with another presence.
Suddenly, while she stood thus, she dropped bodily, going fully under the water for a brief moment, as if renewing her baptism, and when she presently lifted herself, she was crying aloud, sobbing as a child sobs in the awful momentary despair of grief at the untwining of arms--shaken, unrestrained.
While she stood thus for a few minutes only,--a pathetic waste of sorrow, wet, dark and forlorn, alone on the night-shore,--a sudden wind, a common evening current, threw a foaming wave over the logs beside her so that its spray covered her over; while the straining ropes, breaking and bumping timbers, with the slow dripping of the spent wave through the raft, seemed to answer and possibly to assuage her agitation; for, as the wind passed and the waters subsided, she suddenly grew still, and, climbing the bank as she had come, walked evenly as one at peace, into her cabin.