He lifted his head and she smiled into the fever-bright eyes set so deeply now in his ravaged visage. There were words on her lips, trembling to be uttered. But she dared not believe they would add to his strength if spoken. He loved her. She had long known that--had long understood that loving her had not hardened his capacity for the dogged duty which lay before him. To win out was a task sufficiently desperate; to win out and bring her through alive was the double task that was slowly, visibly killing this man whose burning, sunken eyes gazed into hers. She dared not triple that task; the cry in her heart died unuttered, lest he ever waver in duty to his country when in some vital crisis that sacred duty clashed with the obligations that fettered him to a girl who had confessed she loved him. No; the strength that he might derive from such a knowledge was not that deathless energy and clear thinking necessary to blind, stern, unswerving devotion to the motherland. Love of woman, and her love given, could only make the burden of decision triply heavy for this man who stood staring at space beside her here in the forest twilight where shreds of the night mist floated like ghosts and a lost sunspot glowed and waned and glowed on last year's leaves. The girl pressed her waist with his arm, straightened her shoulders and stood erect; and with a quick gesture cleared her brow of its cloudy golden hair. "Now," she said coolly, "we carry on, you and I, Kay, to the honour and glory of the land that trusts us in her hour of need... Are you are right again?" "All right, Yellow-hair," he said pleasantly. On the third day the drive had forced them from the hilly western woods, eastward and inexorably toward that level belt of shaggy forest, scrub growth, and arid, bowlder-strewn table-land where there was probably no water, nothing living to kill for food, and only the terrific ravines beyond where cliffs fell downward to the dim green world lying somewhere below under its blanket of Alpine mist. On the fourth day, still crowded outward and toward the ragged edge of the mountain world, they found, for the first time, no water to fill their bottles. Realising their plight, McKay turned desperately westward, facing pursuit, ranging the now narrow forest in hopes of an opportunity to break through the closing line of beaters. But it proved to be a deadline that he and his half-starved comrade faced; shadowy figures, half seen, sometimes merely heard and divined, flitted everywhere through the open woods beyond them. And at night a necklace of fires--hundreds of them--barred the west to them, curving outward like the blade of a flaming scimitar. On the fifth day McKay, lying in his blanket beside the girl, told her that if they found no water that day they must let their carrier-pigeon go.