“Only ’bout’s far’s the cat-boat, ’Laddin, please,” she said.  “I oughtn’t to of come ’t all.”

Somehow the cat-boat, anchored fifty yards out and straining back from her moorings, would not allow herself to be approached.  For although Aladdin maintained a proper direction (at times), the ocean tide, setting rigidly in and overbearing the current of the river, was beginning to carry the skiff to some haven where she would not be.

Aladdin saw this and tried to go back, catching many crabs in the earnestness of his endeavor.  Then the little girl, without being told, perceived that matters were not entirely in the hands of man, and began to look wistfully from Aladdin to the shore.  After a while he stopped grinning, and then rowing.

“Can’t you get back, ’Laddin?” said the little girl.

“No,” said the boy, “I can’t.”  He was all angel now, for he was being visited for wrong.

The little girl’s lips trembled and got white.

“I’m awful sorry, Margaret.”

“What’ll we do, ’Laddin?”

“Just sit still, ‘n’ whatever happens I’ll take care of you, Margaret.”

They were passing the shipyards with a steady sweep, but the offices were closed, the men at home, and no one saw the distressed expedition.  The last yard of all was conspicuous by a three-master, finished, painted, sparred, ready for the fragrant bottle to be cracked on her nose, and the long shivering slide into the river.  Then came a fine square, chimneyed house with sherry-glass-shaped elm-trees about it.  The boy shouted to a man contorted under a load of wood.  The man looked up and grinned vacantly, for he was not even half-witted.  And they were swept on.  Presently woods drew between them and the last traces of habitation,—­gorgeous woods with intense splashes of color, standing upon clean rocks that emphatically divided the water from the land,—­and they scurried into a region as untroubled by man as was Eden on the first morning.  The little boy was not afraid, but so sorry and ashamed that he could have cried.  The little girl, however, was even deeper down the throat of remorse, for she had sinned three times on Sunday,—­first, she had spoken to the “inventor’s boy”; second, she had not “come straight home”; third, she had been seduced into a forbidden boat,—­and there was no balm in Gilead; nor any forgiveness forever.  She pictured her grand, dark father standing like a biblical allegory of “Hell and Damnation” within the somber leathern cube of his books, the fiercely white, whalebone cane upon which he and old brother gout leaned, and the vast gloomy centers at the bases of which glowed his savage eyes.  She thought of the rolling bitter voice with which she had once heard him stiffen the backs of his constituents, and she was sore afraid.  She did not remember how much he loved her, or the impotence of his principles where she was concerned.  And she did not recollect, for she had not been old enough to know, that the great bitter voice, with its heavy, telling sarcasm, had been lifted for humanity—­for more humanity upon earth.