“I will not go with you,” said she, making of her bundle a pillow.  Then, very coolly, she extended her slim body and laid her head on the bundle.

I made no answer, nor any movement for fully an hour.  Then, very stealthily, I leaned forward to see if she truly slept.  And found her eyes wide open.

“You waste time mounting sentry over me,” she said in a low voice.  “Best employ your leisure in the sleep you need.”

“I can not sleep.”

“Nor I—­ if you remain here awake beside me.”

She raised herself on her elbow, peering through the darkness toward the stream.

“The Siwanois has been standing yonder by the stream watching us this full hour past.  Let him mount sentry if he wishes.”

“You have a tree-cat’s eyes,” I said.  “I see nothing.”

Then I rose and unbuckled my belt.  Hatchet and knife dangled from it.  I stooped and laid it beside her.  Then, stepping backward a pace or two, I unlaced my hunting shirt of doe-skin, drew it off, and, rolling it into a soft pillow, lay down, cradling my cheek among the thrums.

I do not know how long I lay there before I fell asleep from very weariness of the new and deep emotions, as strange to me as they were unwelcome.  The restlessness, the misgivings which, since I first had seen this maid, had subtly invaded me, now, grown stronger, assailed me with an apprehension I could neither put from me nor explain.  Nor was this vague fear for her alone; for, at moments, it seemed as though it were for myself I feared—­ fearing myself.

So far in my brief life, I had borne myself cleanly and upright, though the times were loose enough, God knows, and the master of Guy Park had read me no lesson or set me no example above the morals and the customs of his class and of the age.

It may have been pride—­ I know not what it was, that I could notice the doings of Sir John and of young Walter Butler and remain aloof, even indifferent.  Yet, this was so.  Never had a woman’s beauty stirred me otherwise than blamelessly,” never had I entertained any sentiment toward fashionable folly other than aversion and a kind of shamed contempt.

Nor had I been blind at Guy Park and Butlersbury and Tribes Hill, nor in Albany, either.  I knew Clarissa Putnam; I also knew Susannah Wormwood and her sister Elizabeth, and all that pretty company; and many another pretty minx and laughing, light-minded lass in county Tryon.  And a few in Cambridge, too.  So I was no niais, no naive country fool, unless to remain aloof were folly.  And I often wondered to myself how this might really be, when Boyd rallied me and messmates laughed.

And now, as I lay there under the clustered stars, my head pillowed on my deer-skin shirt, my mind fell a-groping for reason to bear me out in my strained and strange perplexity.

Why, from the time I first had spoken to her, should thoughts of this strange and ragged maid have so possessed me that each day my memory of her returned, haunting me, puzzling me, plaguing my curiosity till imagination awoke, spurring my revery to the very border of an unknown land where rides Romance, in armour, vizor down.