can I find the boat?"

"You cannot find it at all."

"But," he added, with sudden recollection, "I could never return it again."

Marianson saw on the cave's rough wall a vision of her boat carrying him away. Her own little craft, the sail of which she knew how to trim—her bird, her flier, her food-winner—was to become her robber.

"When the war is over," she ventured, "then you might come back."

He began to explain difficulties like an honest lad, and she stopped him. "I do not want to know anything. I want you to take my boat."

He put the cup down and seized her hands and kissed them. She crouched against the cave's side, her eyes closed. If he was only grateful to her for bread and shelter and means of escape, it was little enough she received, but his warm touch and his lips on her palms—for he kissed her palms—made her none the less dizzy.

"Listen to me," said Marianson. "If I give you my boat, you must do exactly as I bid you."

"I promise."

"You must stay here until I bring it to you. I am going at once."

"But you cannot go alone in the dark. You are a woman—you will be afraid."

"Never in my life have I been afraid."

"But there are Indians on the war-path now."

"They will be in camp or drunk at the post. Your Sioux has left this part of the island. He may come back by morning, but he would not camp away from so much plunder. Sioux cannot be unlike our Chippewas. Do you think," demanded Marianson, "that you will be quite, quite safe in the cave?"

Her companion laughed.

"If I find the cave unsafe I can leave it; but you in the dark alone—you must let me go with you."

"No; the risk is too great. It is better for me to go alone. I know every rock, every bend of the shore. The pull back around the island will be hardest, if there is not enough wind."

"I go with you," decided the boy.

"But you gave me your promise to do exactly as I bade you. I am older than you," said Marianson.

"I know what is best, and that is that you remain here until I come. Swear to me that you will."

He was silent, beseeching her with his eyes to relent. Then, owning her right to dominate, he pledged her by the name of his saint to do as she required.

Their forced companionship, begun at daylight, was ending as darkness crept through the cavern's mouth. They waited, and those last moments of silence, while they leaned to look closely at each other with the night growing between them, were a benediction on the day.

Marianson stooped to creep through the cavern's mouth, but once more she turned and looked at him, and it was she herself who stretched appealing arms. The boy's shyness and the woman's aversion to men vanished as in fire. They stood together in the hollow of the cave in one long embrace. He sought her mouth and kissed her, and, suffocating with joy, she escaped through the low door.

Indifferent to the Indian who might be dogging her, she drew her strip of home-spun around her face and ran, moccasined and deft-footed, over the stones, warm, palpitating, and laughing, full of physical hardihood. In the woods, on her left, she knew there were rocks splashed with stain black as ink and crusted with old lichens. On her right white-caps were running before the west wind and diving like ducks on the strait. She crossed the threads of a brook ravelling themselves from density. For the forest was a mask. But Marianson knew well the tricks of that brook—its pellucid shining on pebbles, its cascades, its hidings underground of all but a voice and a crystal pool. Wet to her knees, she had more than once followed it to its source amid such greenery of moss and logs as seemed a conflagration of verdure.

The many points and bays of the island sped behind her, and cliffs crowded her to the water's edge or left her a dim moving object on a lonesome beach. Sometimes she heard sounds in the woods and listened; on the other hand, she had the companionship of stars and moving