“I mean that I am outside all the good of this world, since the one good which I crave and cannot have is the gate to all the rest,” said Lot.  Then suddenly he cried out passionately, lifting up his face to the sky, “O God, why need it be so?  Why need a man be a bond-slave to one hunger?  Why need this one woman be the angel with the flaming sword before all the little pleasures I used to taste and love?  Why need she come between me and the breath of the woods, and the incense of the fields, and their secrets which were to me before my own, so I can take no more delight in them?”

Madelon looked at him half in pity, half in proud resentment.  “If it is so,” she said, “it was not of my own accord I came; you know that, Lot Gordon.  I meant no harm to you, and the harm that I did you brought upon yourself.  I would not have come here to-day if I had known you were here and that it would disturb you.”

“You could not have helped coming,” said Lot.  “I have been here since morning, and you have been here all the while.”

“Why do you talk so, Lot Gordon?” cried Madelon, angrily, for Lot’s covert meanings fretted her straightforwardness beyond endurance.  “You know that I have just come here!”

“You came here when I did,” said Lot, “when the fields were dewy.  You held up your skirts and stepped daintily.  I went ahead and you followed, high-kilted, pointing your steps among the wet grasses like a dove.  Had I looked over my shoulder I could have seen you, but I looked not lest the power of flight might be in you like the dove.”

“I shall go away if you talk like this.  I will not stay here and listen to it; you know I was not here,” said Madelon, and she paled a little, for she almost thought, used to his fanciful talk though she were, that Lot had gone mad.

“We walked towards the sun,” persisted Lot, “but you were in my shadow and needed not to cast down your eyes.  I saw some red flowers, but I did not pick them for you, and I heard you stop and break the stems as you came after.  When we reached the shade of the firs there I sat down, but I left the space there, where the needles are smoothest and thickest, for you, and there you sat too, all day.”

“Lot Gordon!”

“You need not mind, Madelon, for all day I looked not over my shoulder once.  I saw not your face, nor touched your lips, nor your hand, nor even the fold of your dress.  I harmed you not, even in my dreams, dear.”

Madelon, standing quite free of the clinging blackberry vines, held up her dark head like an empress, and looked at him.  In truth she felt little pity for Lot Gordon then, for she liked not being made to follow other than Burr even in a man’s dreams.  Still, when she spoke it was not unkindly, for in spite of this jealousy of herself for Burr, and in spite of her inability to understand such worship of herself, when she was spent in worship of another, she remembered how she had nearly taken the life of this man, and how he had striven to shield her, though against her will, and on hard and selfish conditions, and how he had at last sacrificed himself to set her free.