“I wonder what Redbud thinks of me?” he murmured again, with his old dreamy smile.  “Can she find anything to like in me?  What am I?  Poor, poor Verty—­you are very weak, and the stream here is laughing at you.  You are a poor forest boy—­there can be nothing in you for Redbud to like.  Oh! if she could!  But we are friends, I know—­about the other, why think? what is it?  Love!—­what is love?  It must be something strange—­or why do I feel as if to be friends was not enough?  Love!”

And Verty’s head drooped.

“Love, love!” he murmured.  “Oh, yes!  I know what it means!  They laugh at it—­but they ought not to.  It is heaven in the heart—­sunshine in the breast.  Oh, I feel that what I mean by love is purer than the whole wide world besides!  Yes, yes—­because I would die for her!  I would give my life to save her any suffering—­her hand on my forehead would be dearer and sweeter than the cool spring in the hills after a weary, day-long hunt, when I come to it with hot cheeks and burnt-up throat!  Oh, yes!  I may be an Indian, and be different—­but this is all to me—­this feeling, as if I must go to her, and kneel down and tell her that my life is gone from me when I am not near her—­that I walk and live like a man dreaming, when she does not smile on me and speak to me!”

Verty’s head drooped, and his cheeks reddened with the ingenuous blush of boyhood.  Then he raised his head, and murmured, with a smile, which made his face beautiful—­so full of light and joy was it.

“Yes—­I think I am in love with Redbud—­and she does not think it wrong, I am sure—­oh, I don’t think she will think it wrong in me, and turn against me, only because I love her!”

Having arrived at this conclusion, Verty went along smiling, and admiring the splendid tints of the foliage—­drinking in the fresh, breezy air of morning, and occasionally listening for the cries of game—­of deer, and turkey, pheasants, and the rest.  He heard with his quick ear many of these sounds:  the still croak of the turkey, the drumming of the pheasant; more than once saw disappear on a distant hill, like a flying shadow, the fallow deer, which he had so often chased and shot.  But on that morning he could not leave his path to follow the wild deer, or slay the lesser game, of which the copses were full.  Mastered by a greater passion even than hunting, Verty drew near Apple Orchard—­making signs with his head to the deer to go on their way, and wholly oblivious of pheasants.

He reached Apple Orchard just as the sun soared redly up above the distant forest; and the old homestead waked up with it.  Morning always smiled on Apple Orchard, and the brilliant flush seemed, there, more brilliant still; while all the happy breezes flying over it seemed to regret their destiny which led them far away to other clouds.