Evidently this was not at all to the young man's mind, but repressing outward expression of his feelings, he simply asked, "Will you not go back to the place of my accident, and see if you can see anything of my horse? I don't think he would wander away from me, he is too much of a pet; and if you can find him, I am sure I shall be able to mount and get back to my quarters without putting you or your people to any more trouble on my account." By some queer mental process, Ellen inferred that the soldier had good cause to fear the ministrations of her own people, and yet she did not know how to answer such an inference. So she simply hurried back to the spot indicated, and there, not twenty feet from where she had found the officer, she saw the white horse, quietly barking the cottonwood tree to which he was carefully tied. She unfastened him, and leading him onward, remarked: "I guess your enemies, whoever they are, did not intend real harm to you for they have left your horse securely tied not far from where you lay." "I certainly owe them my heartfelt gratitude for that much; and to you I owe, what shall I say?" She was assisting him now to rise, and her face was close to his own, while his eyes shone with the look that had dazzled her once before. "Shall I say that I owe to you not only my heartfelt gratitude, but its inmost devotion?" Ellen trembled, with a vague feeling which was half repulsion, half enchantment. She had never in her most romantic dreams imagined anything half so sudden, nor half so eloquent as she felt this warm, openly expressed admiration to be. She hardly knew whether it pleased or frightened her most. One thing was sure, she was so anxious to get back home that she hardly said another word to her companion. As he stoopingly bent over his horse in evident weakness and raised his cap with his uninjured hand, he said in a low, thrilling tone: "This beautiful green retreat will be to me for the rest of my life a sweet, solemn temple. For here I have met not only a threatened and averted danger, but have seen and known its high priestess to be a maiden with an angel's face and a heart of gold. May heaven guard you, my sweet friend, till we meet again." Ellen gave him one shy, half-frightened glance, and then with her heart choking her throat with violent emotion, she sped like a timid hare to her home, through fast deepening twilight. The soldier, once the girl was out of sight, coolly straightened out his arm, put the bandage in his pocket, snapped his fingers at the distant mountain peaks and rode away whistling a French love ditty. At the door Ellen met Aunt Clara, just going out with a bowl of gruel to a neighbor's sick child. Aunt Clara noted with her ever observant eye the quickened breathing, the air of indefinable excitement about the girl, even in the gloaming twilight, and pausing to stop Ellen from entering the house, she asked quietly: