“How could you love me then?”

“God knows....  And afterward, on the rock in the moonlight—­ as you lay there asleep—­ oh, I knew not what so moved me to leave you my message and a wild-rose lying there....  It was my destiny—­ my destiny!  I seemed to fathom it....  For when you spoke to me on the parade at the Middle Fort, such a thrill of happiness possessed me——­”

“You rebuked and rebuked me, sweeting!”

“Because all my solicitude was for you, and how it might disgrace you.”

“I could have knelt there at your ragged feet, in sight of all the fort!”

“Could you truly, Euan?”

“As willingly as I kneel at prayer!”

“How dear and gallant and sweet you are to me——­” She broke off in dismay.  “Ai-me!  Heaven pity us both, for we are saying what should wait to be said, and have talked of love only while vowing not to do so!...  Let loose my hand, Euan—­ that somehow has stolen into yours.  Ai-me!  This is a very maze I seem to travel in, with every pitfall hiding all I would avoid, and everywhere ambush laid for me....  Listen, dear lad, I am more pitifully at your mercy than I dreamed of.  Be faithful to my faithless self that falters.  Point out the path from your own strength and compassion....  I—­ I must find my way to Catharines-town before I can give myself to thoughts of you—­ to dreams of all that you inspire in me.”

“Listen, Lois.  This fort is as far as you may go.”

“What!”

“Truly, dear maid.  It is not alone the perils of an unknown country that must check you here.  There is a danger that you know not of—­ that you never even heard of.”

“A danger?”

“Worse.  A threat of terrors hellish, inconceivable, terrible beyond words.”

“What do you mean?  The hatchet?  The stake?  Dear lad, may I not then venture what you soldiers brave so lightly?”

“It is not what we brave that threatens you!”

“What then?” she asked, startled.

“Dear did you ever learn that you are a ’Hidden Child’?”

“What is that, Euan?”

“Then you do not know?”

She shook her head.

And so I told her; told her also all that we had guessed concerning her; how that her captive mother, terrified by Amochol and his red acolytes, had concealed her, consecrated her, and, somehow, had found a runner to carry her beyond the doors of the Long House to safety.

This runner must have written the Iroquois message which I had read amid the corn-husks of her garret.  It was all utterly plain and horrible now, to her and to myself.

As for the moccasins, the same faithful runner must have carried them to her, year after year, and taken back with him to the desolate mother the assurance that her child was living and still undiscovered and unharmed by Amochol.

All this I made plain to her; and I also told her that I, too, was of the Hidden Ones; and made it most clear to her who I really was.  And I told her of the Cat-People, and of the Erie, and how the Sorcerer had defied us and boasted that the Hidden Child should yet die strangled upon the altar of Red Amochol.