“Perhaps not,” said Haward lightly.  “It is a very foolish thing to do.”

The flame died out, and the trader tossed aside the charred bit of bark.  “There was old Pierre at Monacan-Town who taught me to pray to le bon Dieu.  He told me how grand and fine is a French gentleman, and that I was the son of many such.  He called the English great pigs, with brains as dull and muddy as the river after many rains.  My mother was the daughter of a chief.  She had strings of pearl for her neck, and copper for her arms, and a robe of white doeskin, very soft and fine.  When she was dead and my father was dead, I came from Monacan-Town to your English school over yonder.  I can read and write.  I am a white man and a Frenchman, not an Indian.  When I go to the villages in the woods, I am given a lodge apart, and the men and women gather to hear a white man speak....  You have done me wrong with that girl, that Ma’m’selle Audrey that I wish for wife.  We are enemies:  that is as it should be.  You shall not have her,—­never, never!  But you despise me; how is that?  That day upon the creek, that night in your cursed house, you laughed”—­

The Haward of the mountain pass, regarding the twitching face opposite him and the hand clenched upon the handle of a knife, laughed again.  At the sound the trader’s face ceased to twitch.  Haward felt rather than saw the stealthy tightening of the frame, the gathering of forces, the closer grasp upon the knife, and flung out his arm.  A hare scurried past, making for the deeper woods.  From the road came the tramp of a horse and a man’s voice, singing,—­

    “‘To all you ladies now on land’”—­

while an inquisitive dog turned aside from the road, and plunged into the dell.

The rider, having checked his horse and quit his song in order to call to his dog, looked through the thin veil of foliage and saw the two men beneath the holly-tree.  “Ha, Jean Hugon!” he cried.  “Is that you?  Where is that packet of skins you were to deliver at my store?  Come over here, man!”

The trader moistened his dry lips with his tongue, and slipped the knife back into its sheath.  “Had we been a mile in the woods,” he said, “you would have laughed no more.”

Haward watched him go.  The argument with the rider was a lengthy one.  He upon horseback would not stand still in the road to finish it, but put his beast into motion.  The trader, explaining and gesticulating, walked beside his stirrup; the voices grew fainter and fainter,—­were gone.  Haward laughed to himself; then, with his eyes raised to the depth on depth of blue, serene beyond the grating of thorn-pointed leaves, sent his spirit to his red brick house and silent, sunny garden, with the gate in the ivied wall, and the six steps down to the boat and the lapping water.

The shadows lengthened, and a wind of the evening entered the wood.  Haward shook off the lethargy that had kept him lying there for the better part of an afternoon, rose to his feet, and left the green dell for the road, all shadow now, winding back to the toy metropolis, to Marot’s ordinary, to the ball at the Palace that night.