Now that he was alone, question after question leapt unanswered through his mind, and every vein in his body throbbed with strange excitement.  Not for an instant did he doubt what she had said.  This world—­the forests about him, the lakes, the blue skies above, were her home.  And yet, struggling vainly for a solution of the mystery, he told himself in the next breath that this could not be possible.  Her voice had revealed nothing of the wilderness —­except in its sweetness.  Not a break had marred the purity of her speech.  She had risen before him like the queen of some wonderful kingdom, and not like a forest girl.  And in her face he had seen the soul of one who had looked upon the world as the world lived outside of its forest walls.  Yet he believed her.  This was her home.  Her hair, her eyes, the flowerlike lithesomeness of her beautiful body—­and something more, something that he could not see but which he could feel in her presence, told him that this was so.  This wonder-world about him was her home.  But why—­ how?

He seated himself on a rock, holding the open watch in his hand.  Of one thing he was sure.  She was oppressed by a strange fear.  It was not the fear of being alone, of being lost, of some happen-chance peril that she might fancy was threatening her.  It was a deeper, bigger thing than that.  And she had confessed to him—­not wholly, but enough to make him know—­that this fear was of man.  He felt at this thought a little thrill of joy, of undefinable exultation.  He sprang from the rock and went down to the shore of the lake, scanning its surface with eager, challenging eyes.  In these moments he forgot that civilization was waiting for him, that for eighteen months he had been struggling between life and death at the naked and barbarous end of the earth.  All at once, in the space of a few minutes, his world had shrunken until it held but two things for him—­the autumn-tinted forests, and the girl.  Beyond these he thought of nothing except the minutes that were dragging like thirty weights of lead.

As the hand of his watch marked off the twenty-fifth of the prescribed thirty he turned his steps in the direction of the pool.  He half expected that she would be there when he came over the ridge of rock.  But she had not returned.  He looked up the coulee, end then at the firm white sand close to the water.  The imprints of her feet were there—­small, narrow imprints of a heeled shoe.  Unconsciously he smiled, for no other reason than that each surprise he encountered was a new delight to him.  A forest girl as he had known them would have worn moccasins—­six hundred miles from civilization.

As he was about to leap across the narrow neck of the pool he noticed a white object almost buried in the dry sand, and picked it up.  It was a handkerchief; and this, too, was a surprise.  He had not particularly noticed her dress, except that it was soft and clinging blue.  The handkerchief he looked at more closely.  It was of fine linen with a border of lace, and so soft that he could have hidden it in the palm of his hand.  From it rose a faint, sweet scent of the wild rock violet.  He knew that it was rock violet, because more than once he had crushed the blossoms between his hands.  He thrust the bit of fabric in the breast of his flannel shirt, and walked swiftly up the coulee.