“Why, How?”

“Because you care for me.”

“But it would be because I didn’t care for you that I’d go, you know.”

“You’d find your mistake and come back.”

The clasped hand locked, as once before they had done.

“And when I did—­come back—­you’d forgive me, How?”

“There’d be nothing to forgive.”

“It wouldn’t be wrong—­to leave you that way?”

“To me you could do no wrong, Bess.”

“Not if I did anything, if I—­ran away with another man?”

The listener smiled, until the beardless face was very, very boyish.

“I can’t imagine the impossible, Bess.”

“But just supposing I should?” insistently.  “You’d take me back, no matter what I’d done, and forgive me?”

For a half minute wherein the smile slowly vanished from his face the man did not answer, merely looked at her; then for the first time since they had been speaking his eyes dropped.

“I could forgive you anything, Bess; but to take you back, to have everything go on as before—­I am human.  I could not.”

A moment longer the two remained so, each staring at their feet; then of a sudden, interrupting, the girl laughed, unmusically, hysterically.

“I’m glad you said that, How,” she exulted; “glad I compelled you to say it.  As you confess, it makes you seem more human.  A god shouldn’t marry a mortal, you know.”

The man looked up gravely, but he said nothing.

“I’m going to make you answer me just one more thing,” rushed on the girl, “and then I’m satisfied.  You’d forgive me, you say, forgive me anything; but how about the other man, the one who had induced me to run away?  Would you forgive him, too?”

Silence, dead silence; but this time the Indian’s eyes did not drop.

“You may as well tell me, How.  I’m irresponsible to-night and I won’t give you any peace until you do.  Would you forgive the other man, too?”

Once more for seconds there was a lapse; then slowly the Indian lifted in his place, lifted until he was sitting, lifted until his face stood out clear in the light like the carving of a master.

“Forgive him, Bess?” A pause.  “Do you think I am a god?”

That was all, neither an avowal nor a denial; yet no human being looking at the speaker that moment would have pressed the query farther, no human being could have misread the answer.  With the same little hysterical, unnatural laugh the girl sank back in her seat.  The tense hands went lax.

“I’ll be good now, How,” she said dully.  “One isn’t married every day, you know, and it’s got on my nerves.  I’m finding out a lot of things lately, and that’s one of them:  that I have nerves.  I never supposed before that I possessed them.”

Deliberately, without a shade of hesitation or of uncertainty, the man arose.  As deliberately he walked over and very, very gently lifted the girl to her feet.