“In that is the danger,” she said quickly.  “But you have spoken the words as I would have had you speak them.  It is this danger that must be buried—­deep—­deep.  And you will bury it.  You will urge no questions that I do not wish to answer.  You will fight for me, blindly, knowing only that what I ask you to do is not sinful nor wrong.  And in the end—­”

She hesitated.  Her face had grown as tense as his own.

“And in the end,” she whispered, “your greatest reward can be only the knowledge that in living this knighthood for me you have won what I can never give to any man.  The world can hold only one such man for a woman.  For your faith must be immeasurable, your love as pure as the withered violets out there among the rocks if you live up to the tests ahead of you.  You will think me mad when I have finished.  But I am sane.  Off there, in the Snowbird Lake country, is my home.  I am alone.  No other white man or woman is with me.  As my knight, the one hope of salvation that I cling to now, you will return with me to that place—­as my husband.  To all but ourselves we shall be man and wife.  I will bear your name—­or the one by which you must be known.  And at the very end of all, in that hour of triumph when you know that you have borne me safely over that abyss at the brink of which I am hovering now, you will go off into the forest, and—­”

She approached him, and laid a hand on his arm.  “You will not come back,” she finished, so gently that he scarcely heard her words.  “You will die—­for me—­for all who have known you.”

“Good God!” he breathed, and he stared over her head to where the red and gold billows of the forests seemed to melt away into the skies.

CHAPTER FOUR

Thus they stood for many seconds.  Never for an instant did her eyes leave his face, and Philip looked straight over her head into that distant radiance of the forest mountains.  It was she whose emotions revealed themselves now.  The blood came and went in her cheeks.  The soft lace at her throat rose and fell swiftly.  In her eyes and face there was a thing which she had not dared to reveal to him before—­a prayerful, pleading anxiety that was almost ready to break into tears.

At last she had come to see and believe in the strength and wonder of this man who had come to her from out of the North, and now he stared over her head with that strange white look, as if the things she had said had raised a mountain between them.  She could feel the throb of his arm on which her hand rested.  All at once her calm had deserted her.  She had never known a man like this, had never expected to know one; and in her face there shone the gentle loveliness of a woman whose soul and not her voice was pleading a great cause.  It was pleading for her self.  And then he looked down.

“You want to go—­now,” she whispered.  “I knew that you would.”