It was blindingly intense, and when his senses cleared he knew that she was gone.  He felt as if he had awakened from a night full of dreams more vivid than life—­dreams which left him too weak to cope with reality.

For a time he dared not move.  He was feeling for himself like a man who fumbles his way down a dark passage dangerous with obstructions.  At last it was as if his hand touched the knob of a door; he swung it open, entered a room full of dazzling light—­himself.  He shrank back from it; closed his eyes against what he might see.

All he knew, then, was an overpowering will to see her.  He turned, inch by inch, little degree by degree, knowing that if, when he turned, he looked into her eyes, the end would rush upon them, overwhelm them, carry them along like straws on the flooding river.  At last his head was turned; he looked.

She lay on her back, smiling as she slept.  One arm hung down from the bunk and the graceful fingers trailed, palm up, on the floor, curling a little, as if she had just relaxed her grasp on something.  And down past her shoulder, half covering the whiteness of her arm, fled the torrent of brown hair, with the firelight playing through it like a sunlit mist.

He rose, and dressed with a deadly caution, for he knew that he must go at once, partly for her sake that he must be seen apart from her this night—­partly because he knew that he must leave and never come back.

He had hit upon the distinctive feature of the girl—­a purity as thin and clear as the air of the uplands in which she drew breath.  He stooped and smoothed down the blankets of his bunk, for no trace of him must be seen if any other man should come during this night.  He would go far away—­see and be seen—­apart from Sally Fortune.  He picked up his saddle.

Before he departed he leaned low above her as she must have done above him, until the dark shadow of lashes was tremulous against her cheek.  Then he straightened and stole step by step across the floor, to the door, to the night; all the myriad small white eyes of the heavens looked down to him in hushed surprise.

CHAPTER XXXVI

JERRY WOOD

When he was at the old Drew place before, Logan had told him of Jerry Wood’s place, five miles to the north among the hills; and to this he now directed his horse, riding at a merciless speed, as if he strove to gain, from the swift succession of rocks and trees that whirled past him, new thoughts to supplant the ones which already occupied him.

He reached in a short time a little rise of ground below which stretched a darkly wooded hollow, and in the midst the trees gave back from a small house, a two-storied affair, with not a light showing.  He wished to announce himself and his name at this place under the pretence of asking harbourage for the brief remainder of the night.  The news of what he had done at Drew’s place could not have travelled before him to Wood’s house; but the next day it would be sure to come, and Wood could say that he had seen Bard—­alone—­the previous night.  It would be a sufficient shield for the name of Sally Fortune in that incurious region.