By his side, and within two feet of the renegade, lay extended the beautiful form of Ella Barnwell—­with nothing but a blanket and her own garments between her and the earth—­with none but a similar covering over her—­with her head resting upon a stone, and apparently asleep.  We say apparently asleep; but the drowsy son of Erebus and Nox had not yet closed her eyelids in slumber; for there were thoughts in her breast more potent than all his persuasive arts of forgetfulness, or those of his prime minister, Morpheus.  Was she thinking of her own hard fate—­away there in that lonely forest—­with not a friend nigh that could render her assistance—­with no hope of escape from the awful doom to which she was hastening?  Or was she thinking of him, for whom her heart yearned with all the thousand, undefined, indescribable sympathies of affection?—­of him who so lately had been her companion?—­for the heart of love measures duration, not by the cold mathematical calculation of minutes and hours, and days and weeks, and months and years, but by events and feelings; and the acquaintance of weeks may seem the friend of years, and the acquaintance of years be almost forgotten in weeks;—­was she thinking of him, we say—­of Algernon? who, even in misery, had been torn from her side, had said perchance his last trembling farewell, and gone to suffer a death at which humanity must shudder!  Ay, all these thoughts, and a thousand others, were rushing wildly through her feverish brain.  She thought of her own fate—­of his—­of her relations—­pictured out in her imagination the terrible doom of each—­and her tender heart became wrung to the most excruciating point of agony.

By the side of Ella, was her adopted mother—­buried in that troubled sleep which great fatigue sends to the body, even when the mind is ill at ease, filling it with startling visions—­and around the fire, as we said before, lay the dusky forms of the savages, lost to all consciousness of the outer world.  The position of Ella was such, that, by slightly turning her head, she could command a view of the features of the renegade; whose strange workings, as before noted, served to fix her attention and divide her thoughts between him, as the cause of her present unhappiness, and that unhappiness itself—­and she gazed on his loathsome, contorted countenance, with much the same feeling as one might be supposed to gaze upon a serpent coiling itself around the body, whose deadly fangs, either sooner or later, would assuredly give the fatal stroke of death.  She noted the sudden start of Girty, and the wildness with which he peered around him, with feelings of hope and fear—­hope, that rescue might be at hand—­fear, lest something more dreadful was about to happen.  At length Girty started again, and turned his head toward Ella so suddenly, that she had not time to withdraw her eyes ere his were fixed searchingly upon them.

“And are you too awake?” he said, with something resembling a sigh.  “I thought the innocent could ever sleep!”