But love that casts all to the winds, love that forgets tact, prudence, delicacy, love without premeditation or after-thought, is not the love that is ingrained in New England character. She gazed at him at first, not comprehending--her fears still blinding her--and he paused to murmur words of pity and reassurance. And then Yankee prudence, given its opportunity to whisper, told him that to act the precipitate lover now would be to take advantage of her weakness, her helplessness, her gratitude. If he took this first chance to woo her, demanding, as it were, that she disobey her father's commands, and putting a price on the service that he was rendering her, might her good sense not suggest that, after all, he was a sneak rather than a man? They call the New England character of the old bed-rock sort hard and selfish. It is rather acute sensitiveness, timorous even to concealment. And in the end Dwight Wade, faltering banal words of pity for her plight, went to her outwardly calm. And she, her soul still too full of the horror of her experience to let her heart speak what it felt, took his hands and came out upon the rough floor. The shaggy giant squatting by the hearth bent meek and humid eyes on the young man. "Me do it--me do it as you told!" he protested. He patted his hand on the shavings. He was referring to the task to which Wade had set him on Enchanted. To the girl it sounded like the confession of an understanding between this unspeakable creature and her rescuer. Wade, eager only to soothe, protested guilelessly, when she shrank back, that the man was not the ogre he seemed, but a harmless, simple fellow whom he had been sheltering and feeding at his own camp. And then, by the way she stared at him, he realized the chance for a horrible suspicion. "I don't understand," she moaned. "It's like a dreadful dream. There was an old man who sat here and muttered and raved about my father! And this--this"--she faltered, shrinking farther from Abe--"who brought me here in his arms! And you say he came from your camp! Oh, these woods--these terrible woods! Take me away from them! I am afraid!" She dropped the shrouding blanket from her shoulders, and he saw her now in the garb of the waif of the Skeets. And under his scrutiny he saw color in her cheeks for the first time, replacing the pallor of distress. "I had thought there was excuse for this folly--reason for it. I thought it was my duty to--" She faltered, then set her teeth upon her lower lip, and turned away from him. "Oh, take me away from these woods! Something--I do not know--something has bewitched me--made me forget myself--sent me on a fool's errand! The woods--I'm afraid of them, Mr. Wade!"