Those were nightmare minutes.  The girl was very quiet, in a stupor of fatigue and fear.  Shalah was a graven image, and I was too tensely strung to have any of the itches and fervours which used to vex me in hunting the deer when stillness was needful.  Through the fretted greenery, I saw the dim shadows of men passing swiftly.  The thought of the horse worried me.  If the confounded beast grazed peaceably down the other side of the hill, all might be well.  So long as he was out of sight any movement he made would be set down by the Indians to some forest beast, for animals’ noises are all alike in a wood.  But if he returned to us, there would be the devil to pay, for at a glimpse of him our thicket would be alive with the enemy.

In the end I found it best to shut my eyes and commend our case to our Maker.  Then I counted very slowly to myself up to four hundred, and looked again.  The vale was empty.

We lay still, hardly believing in our deliverance, for the matter of a quarter of an hour, and then Shalah, making a sign to me to remain, turned and glided up lull.  I put my hand behind me, found Elspeth’s cheek, and patted it.  She stretched out a hand and clutched mine feverishly, and thus we remained till, after what seemed an age, Shalah returned.

He was on his feet and walking freely.  He had found the horse, too, and had it by the bridle.

“The danger is past,” he said gravely.  “Let us go back to the glade and rest.”

I helped Elspeth to her feet, and on my arm she clambered to the grassy place in the woods.  I searched my pockets, and gave her the remnants of the bread and bacon I had brought from the Rappahannock post.  Better still, I remembered that I had in my breast a little flask of eau-de-vie, and a mouthful of it revived her greatly.  She put her hands to her head, and began to tidy her dishevelled hair, which is a sure sign in a woman that she is recovering her composure.

“What brought you here?” I asked gently.

She had forgotten that I was in her black books, and that in her letter she forbade my journey.  Indeed, she looked at me as a child in a pickle may look at an upbraiding parent.

“I was lost,” she cried.  “I did not mean to go far, but the night came down and I could not find the way back.  Oh, it has been a hideous nightmare!  I have been almost mad in the dark woods.”

“But how did you get here?” I asked, still hopelessly puzzled.

“I was with Uncle James on the Rappahannock.  He heard something that made him anxious, and he was going back to the Tidewater yesterday.  But a message came for him suddenly, and he left me at Morrison’s farm, and said he would be back by the evening.  I did not want to go home before I had seen the mountains where my estate is—­you know, the land that Governor Francis said he would give me for my birthday.  They told me one could see the hills from near at hand, and a boy that I asked said I would get a rare