For a moment after he came in sight John did not see Lolla.  Bessie watched the pair, so different from any people she had ever seen at close range before, narrowly.  She was intensely interested in Lolla, and wondered mightily what the gypsy girl intended to do.  But she did not have long to wait.

Lolla, with a little cry, rushed forward, and, casting herself on the ground at her lover’s feet, seized his hand and kissed it.  At first she said not a word; only looked up at him with her black, brilliant eyes, in which Bessie could see that a tear was glistening.

“Lolla!  What are you doing here?”

At the sight of the girl John had started, nervously.  It was plain that he did not feel secure; that he thought his pursuers might, even thus early, have tracked him down, and, in the moment before he had recognized Lolla, Bessie saw him quail, while his face whitened, so that Bessie knew he was afraid.

That knowledge, somehow, comforted her vastly.  It removed at once some of the formidable quality which John had acquired in her eyes when he stole Dolly after the fright that he must have had when the flashlight powder exploded, almost in his face.  But Bessie remembered that he had plucked up his courage after that scare; the chances were that he would do so again now.

But, if Bessie was afraid of the kidnapper, Lolla was not.  She rose, and faced him defiantly.  Bessie thought there was something splendid about the gypsy girl, and she wondered why John, with such a girl ready and anxious to marry him, had been diverted from her by Dolly, charming though she was.

“I have come to save you, John,” said Lolla.  “Where is the American girl you stole from her friends!”

John started, evidently surprised by Lolla’s knowledge of what he had done, and said something, sharply, in the gypsy tongue, which Bessie, of course, could not understand.  Her question, it was plain, had frightened, as well as startled him; but it had also made him very angry.  Lolla, however, did not seem to mind his anger.  She faced him boldly, without giving ground, although he had moved toward her with a threatening gesture of his uplifted hand.

“Hit me, if you will,” she said.  “I am not your wife yet, but when I am it will be your right to strike me if you wish.  But I know what you have done.  I know, too, that the Americans know it.  Do you think you can escape from these woods without being caught?”

John stared at her angrily.

“I am going now to the camp,” he said.  “If. they come looking for news of the girl, they will find me there, and plenty to swear that I have been there all this night, and so could not have done what they charge.  My tribe will help me; it is my right to call upon it for help.”

“You forget me,” said Lolla, dangerously.  “I will swear that I saw you here, where I came to look for you because you had stayed away from the camp all the night.  And when I tell my brothers, what will they swear?”