“Yes, I want to go,” he replied, and his two hands took hers, and held them close to his breast, so that she felt the excited throbbing of his heart.  “I want to go—­wherever you go.  Perhaps in those years of centuries ago there lived women like you to fight and die for.  I no longer wonder at men fighting for them as they have sung their stories in books.  I have nothing down in that world which you have called civilization—­nothing except the husks of murdered hopes, ambitions, and things that were once joys.  Here I have you to love, to fight for.  For you cannot tell me that I must not love you, even though I swear to live up to your laws of chivalry.  Unless I loved you as I do there would not be those laws.”

“Then you will do all this for me—­even to the end—­when you must sacrifice all of that for which you have struggled, and which you have saved?”

“Yes.”

“If that is so, then I trust you with my life and my honour.  It is all in your keeping—­all.”

Her voice broke in a sob.  She snatched her hands from him, and with that sob still quivering on her lips she turned and ran swiftly to the little tent.  She did not look back as she disappeared into it, and Philip turned like one in a dream and went to the summit of the bare rock ridge, from which he could look over the quiet surface of the lake and a hundred square miles of the unpeopled world which had now become so strangely his own.  An hour—­a little more than that—­had changed the course of his life as completely as the master-strokes of a painter might have changed the tones of a canvas epic.  It did not take reason or thought to impinge this fact upon him.  It was a knowledge that engulfed him overwhelmingly.  So short a time ago that even now he could not quite comprehend it all, he was alone out on the lake, thinking of the story of the First Woman that Jasper had told him down at Fond du Lac.  Since then he had passed through a lifetime.  What had happened might well have covered the space of months—­or of years.  He had met a woman, and like the warm sunshine she had become instantly a part of his soul, flooding him with those emotions which make life beautiful.  That he had told her of this love as calmly as if she had known of it slumbering within his breast for years seemed to him to be neither unreal nor remarkable.

He turned his face back to the tent, but there was no movement there.  He knew that there—­alone—­the girl was recovering from the tremendous strain under which she had been fighting.  He sat down, facing the lake.  For the first time his mental faculties began to adjust themselves and his blood to flow less heatedly through his veins.  For the first time, too, the magnitude of his promise—­of what he had undertaken—­began to impress itself upon him.  He had thought that in asking him to fight for her she had spoken with the physical definition of that word in mind.  But at the outset she had plunged him into mystery.  If she had asked him