In the semi-darkness the man looked at her.  Against the lighter sky her face stood out distinct, clear-cut as a silhouette.

“I do not think it ever right to live a lie, Bess,” he answered.

“Not even to keep another, who is innocent, from suffering?”

“No,” quickly, “not even to keep another from suffering.”

The girl shifted restlessly, repressedly.

“But supposing one’s acknowledging the lie and living the truth makes one, according to the world, bad.  Would that make any difference, How?”

The Indian did not stir, merely lay there looking at her with his steady eyes.

“There are some things one has to decide for one’s self,” he said.  “I think this is one of them.”

Again the arms beneath the girl’s head shifted unconsciously.

“Others judge us after we do decide, though,” she objected.

“What they think doesn’t count.  We’re good or bad, as we’re honest with ourselves or not.”

“You think that, really?”

“I know it, Bess.  There’s no room for doubt.”

Silence fell, and in it the girl’s mind wandered on and on.  At last, abrupt as before, abstractedly as before, came a new thought, a new query.

“Is happiness, after all, the chief end of life, How?” she questioned.

“Happiness, Bess?” He halted.  “Happiness?” repeated; but there was no irony in the voice, only, had the girl noticed, a terrible mute pain.  “How should I know what is best in life, I, who have never known life at all?”

Blind in her own abstraction, the girl had not read beneath the words themselves, did not notice the thinly veiled inference.

“But you must have an idea,” she pressed.  “Tell me.”

This time the answer was not concealed.  It stood forth glaring, where the running might read.

“Yes, I have an idea—­and more,” he said.  “Happiness, your happiness, has always been the first thing in my life.”

Again silence walled them in, a longer silence than before.  Step by step, gropingly, the girl was advancing on her journey.  Step by step she was drawing away from her companion; yet though, wide-eyed, he watched her every motion, felt the distance separating grow wider and wider, he made no move to prevent, threw no obstacle in her path.  Deliberately from his grip, from beneath his very eyes, fate, the relentless, was filching his one ewe lamb; yet he gave no sign of the knowledge, spoke no word of unkindness or of hate.  Nature, the all-observing, could not but have admired her child that night.

One more advance the girl made; and that was the last.  Before she had walked gropingly, as though uncertain of her pathway.  Now there was no hesitation.  The move was deliberate; even certain.