“Madame, I am a great fool.  I am not worth your venturing.”

“You are worth any danger I might encounter.  But you should at least go back for me.”

“I will do anything for you, madame.  But why should I go back?—­you will not long be there.”

“What does that matter?  The important thing is that you should not lapse again into the Indian.”

“Is any life but the life of an Indian open to me, madame?”

She struck her hands together with a scream.

“Louis!  Sire!”

Startled, I dropped the book and it sprawled at her feet like the open missal.  She had returned so unexpectedly to the spirit of our first meeting.

“O, if you knew what you are!  During my whole life your name has been cherished by my family.  We believed you would sometime come to your own.  Believe in yourself!”

I seemed almost to remember and perceive what I was—­as you see in mirage one inverted boat poised on another, and are not quite sure, and the strange thing is gone.

Perhaps I was less sure of the past because I was so sure of the present.  A wisp of brown mist settling among the trees spread cloud behind her.  What I wanted was this woman, to hide in the woods for my own.  I could feed and clothe her, deck her with necklaces of garnets from the rocks, and wreaths of the delicate sand-wort flower.  She said she would rather make Paul a woodchopper than a suppliant, taking the constitutional oath.  I could make him a hunter and a fisherman.  Game, bass, trout, pickerel, grew for us in abundance.  I saw this vision with a single eye; it looked so possible!  All the crude imaginings of youth colored the spring woods with vivid beauty.  My face betrayed me, and she spoke to me coldly.

“Is that your house, monsieur?”

I said it was.

“And you slept there last night?”

“I can build a much better one.”

“What did you have for dinner?”

“Nothing.”

“What did you have for breakfast?”

“Nothing.”

Evidently the life I proposed to myself to offer her would not suit my lady!

She took a lacquered box from the cover of her wrappings, and moved down the slope a few steps.

“Come here to your mother and get your supper.”

I felt tears rush to my eyes.  She sat down, spread a square of clean fringed linen upon the ground, and laid out crusty rounds of buttered bread that were fragrant in the springing fragrance of the woods, firm slices of cold meat, and a cunning pastry which instantly maddened me.  I was ashamed to be such a wolf.

We sat with our forest table between us and ate together.

“I am hungry myself,” she said.

A glorified veil descended on the world.  If evening had paused while that meal was in progress it would not have surprised me.  There are half hours that dilate to the importance of centuries.  But when she had encouraged me to eat everything to the last crumb, she shook the fringed napkin, gathered up the lacquered box, and said she must be gone.