Scrambling up the hillside like a chamois of the mountains, she flitted lightly through the greening to a small open where campers had built night fires.  Her quick glance ran from tree to tree.  Some wood-runner had blazed a trail by notching the bark.  Pausing, she turned with the frank, fearless look of the wilderness woman.  She was no longer the elusive Hortense of secluded life.  A change had come—­the change of the hothouse plant set out to the bufferings of the four winds of heaven to perish from weakness or gather strength from hardship.  Your woman of older lands must hood fair eyes, perforce, lest evil masking under other eyes give wrong intent to candour; but in the wilderness each life stands stripped of pretence, honestly good or evil, bare at what it is; and purity clear as the noonday sun needs no trick of custom to make it plainer.

“Is not this the place?” she asked.

Looking closer, from shrub to open, I recognised the ground of that night attack in the woods.

“Hortense, then it was you that I saw at the fire with the others?”

She nodded assent.  She had not uttered one word to explain how she came to that wild land; nor had I asked.

“It was you who pleaded for my life in the cave below my feet?”

“I did not know you had heard!  I only sent Le Borgne to bring you back!”

“I hid as he passed.”

“But I sent a message to the fort——­”

“Not to be bitten by the same dog twice—­I thought that meant to keep away?”

“What?” asked Hortense, passing her hand over her eyes.  “Was that the message he gave you?  Then monsieur had bribed him!  I sent for you to come to us.  Oh, that is the reason you never came——­”

“And that is the reason you have hidden from me all the year and never sent me word?”

“I thought—­I thought—­” She turned away.  “Ben Gillam told monsieur you had left Boston on our account——­”

“And you thought I wanted to avoid you——­”

“I did not blame you,” she said.  “Indeed, indeed, I was very weak—­monsieur must have bribed Le Borgne—­I sent word again and again—­but you never answered!”

“How could you misunderstand—­O Hortense, after that night in the hunting-room, how could you believe so poorly of me!”

She gave a low laugh.  “That’s what your good angel used to plead,” she said.

“Good angel, indeed!” said I, memory of the vows to that miscreant adventurer fading.  “That good angel was a lazy baggage!  She should have compelled you to believe!”

“Oh—­she did,” says Hortense quickly.  “The poor thing kept telling me and telling me to trust you till I—­”

“Till you what, Hortense?”

She did not answer at once.

“Monsieur and the blackamoor and I had gone to the upper river watching for the expected boats——­”

“Hortense, were you the white figure behind the bush that night we were spying on the Prince Rupert!”