Shirts and soldiers’ blankets lay here and there a-drying on the bushes; a wretched garden-patch showed intensely green between a waste of fire-blackened stumps.  I saw chickens in a coop, and a cow switching forest flies.  A cloud of butterflies flew up as I approached, where the running water of a tiny rill made muddy hollows on the path.  This doubtless must be the outlet to Waiontha Spring, for there to the left a green lane had been bruised through the elder thicket; and this I followed, shouldering my way amid fragrant blossom and sun-hot foliage, then through an alder run, and suddenly out across a gravelly reach where water glimmered in a still and golden pool.

Lois knelt there on the bank.  The soldiers’ linen I had seen in her arms was piled beside her.  In a willow basket, newly woven, I saw a heap of clean, wet shirts and tow-cloth rifle-frocks.

She heard me behind her—­ I took care that she should—­ but she made no sign that she had heard or knew that I was there.  Even when I spoke she continued busy with her suds and shirts; and I walked around the gravelly basin and seated myself near her, cross-legged on the sand, both hands clasping my knees.

“Well?” she asked, still scrubbing, and her hair was fallen in curls about her brow—­ hair thicker and brighter, though scarce longer, than my own.  But Lord!  The wild-rose beauty that flushed her cheeks as she laboured there!  And when she at last looked up at me her eyes seemed like two grey stars, full of reflections from the golden pool.

“I have come,” said I, “to speak most seriously.”

“What is it you wish?”

“A comrade’s privilege.”

“And what may that be, sir?”

“The right to be heard; the right to be answered—­ and a comrade’s privilege to offer aid.”

“I need no aid.”

“None living can truthfully say that,” said I pleasantly.

“Oh!  Do you then require charity from this pleasant world we live in?”

“I did not offer charity to you.”

“You spoke of aid,” she said coldly.

“Lois—­ is there in our brief companionship no memory that may warrant my speaking as honestly as I speak to you?”

“I know of none, Do you?”

I had been looking at her chilled pink fingers.  My ring was gone.

“A ring for a rose is my only warrant,” I said.

She continued to soap the linen and to scrub in silence.  After she had finished the garment and wrung it dry, she straightened her supple figure where she was kneeling, and, turning toward me, searched in her bosom with one little, wet hand, drawing from it a faded ribbon on which my ring hung.

“Do you desire to have it of me again?” she asked, without any expression on her sun-freckled face.

“What?  The ring?”

“Aye “Desire it!” I repeated, turning red.  “No more than you desire the withered bud you left beside me while I slept.”