At the close of the fifth day our night halt was in a deserted log cabin at the edge of an unfinished clearing in the heart of the forest.  Here Richard’s sickness anchored us, and for three full weeks the journey paused.

We nursed the lad as best we could for a fortnight, dosing him with stewings of such roots and herbs as the Catawba could find in the wood.  Then, when we were at our wits’ ends, and Yeates and I were casting about how we could compass the bringing of a doctor from the settlements, the fever took a turn for the better,—­of its own accord, or for Uncanoola’s physickings, we knew not which,—­and at the end of the third week Dick was up and able to ride again, this time without the forked stick to hold him in the saddle.

After this we went on without mishap, and with no hardship greater than that of living solely upon the meat victual provided by the hunter’s rifle; and you who know this plough-dressed region at this later day will wonder when I write it down that in all that long faring, or rather to the last day’s stage of it, we saw never a face of any of our kind, or of the Catawba’s.

You may be sure the month or more we spent thus in the heart of the wildwood was but a sorry time for me.  While the excitement of the pursuit and rescue lasted, and later, when anxiety for Richard filled the hours of the long days and nights, I was held a little back from slipping into that pit of despair which I had digged for myself.

But when the strain was off and Dick was up and fit again, the misery of it all came back with added goadings.  I had never dreamed how cutting sharp ’twould be to see these two together day by day; to see her loving, tender care of him, and to hear him babble of his love for her in his feverish vaporings.  Yet all this I must endure, and with it a thing even harder.  For, to make it worse, if worse could be, the shadow of complete estrangement had fallen between Margery and me.  True to her word, given in that moment when I had besought her not to speak aloud for her own safety’s sake, she had never opened her lips to me; and for aught she said or did I might have been a deaf-mute slave beneath her notice.

And as she drew away from me, she seemed to draw the closer to Richard Jennifer, nursing him alive when he was at his worst, and giving him all the womanly care and sympathy a sick man longs for.  And later, when he was fit to ride again, she had him always at her side in the onward faring.

As I have said before, this was all as I would have it.  Yet it made me sick in my soul’s soul; and at times I must needs fall behind to rave it out in solitude, cursing the day that I was born, and that other more misfortunate day when I had reared the barrier impassable between these two.

What wonder, then, that, as we neared the fighting field of the great war, I grew more set upon seizing the first chance that might offer an honorable escape from all these heartburnings?  ’Twas a weakness, if you choose; I set down here naught but the simple fact, which had by now gone as far beyond excusings as the underlying cause of it was beyond forgiveness.