She pointed to where the red sinking sun seemed to eat out the heart of the bush through which we saw it. "Thus this love-god burns in our hearts," I said, lifted up into her poetic strain, "and we are not consumed, only glorified." I strove to touch her hand, which had dropped caressingly on my horse's neck. But she drew back with a cry. "I may not listen. This is the sinful talk my father warned me of. Fare you well, stranger." And with swift step she turned homewards. I sat still a minute or two, half-disconcerted, half-content to gaze at her gracious motions; then I touched the mare with my heel, and she bounded off in pursuit. But at this instant three men in long gabardines and great round velvet hats started forward from the thicket, shouting and waving lighted pine-branches, and my frightened animal reared and plunged, and then broke into a mad gallop, making straight for the river curve between the cliffs. I threw myself back in the saddle, tugging desperately at the creature's mouth; but I might have been a child pulling at an elephant. I shook my feet free of the stirrups and prepared to tumble off as best I could, rather than risk the plunge into the river, when a projecting bough made me duck my head instinctively; but as I passed under it, with another instinctive movement I threw out my hands to clasp it, and, despite a violent wrench that seemed to pull my arms out of their sockets and swung my feet high forward, I hung safely. The mare, eased of my weight, was at the river-side the next instant, and with a wild, incredible leap alighted with her forefeet and the bulk of her body on the other bank, up which she scraped convulsively, and then stood still, trembling and sweating. I could not get at her, so, trusting she would find her way home safely, I dropped to the ground and ran back, with a mixed idea of finding Bethulah and chastising the three scoundrels. But all were become invisible. I walked half a mile across the plain to get to the rough pine bridge; and, once on the other bank, I had no difficulty in recovering the mare. She cantered up to me, indeed, and put her soft and still perspiring nose in my palm and whinnied her apologetic congratulations on our common escape. I rode slowly home, reflecting on the new turn in my love affairs, for it was plain that Bethulah had now been provided with a body-guard, of which she was as unconscious as of her body itself. But for the apparent necessity of her making soul-ascensions under God's heaven, I supposed she would not have been allowed to take the air at all with such a creature of Satan hovering.