'Just what I was going to say,' replied Hartness, who had gone away a little distance from the bed while we were talking, and had been standing by the table, seeming to examine the strange instruments that were scattered about it. 'Of course the doctor will wish to finish his work alone.' 'May not Vilcaroya and I stay, Laurens?' asked Joyful Star, looking at him with appealing eyes. 'You know it will be much better for her to see another woman by her when she awakes, and then she will recognise Vilcaroya, and that will tell her that she is among friends.' But Djama shook his head and said,-- 'No, Ruth, not yet. There is something else to be done before that--something, well, something that only a medical man ought to see or do, and you really must leave me to do it alone. You forget, it is not merely a matter of waking. She is not alive yet; but if you will leave me alone for about half-an-hour, I promise you that I will call you and Vilcaroya back before she actually wakes.' 'Very well,' she said, moving away from the bedside. 'I don't want to pry into your mysteries.' Then she turned to me, and said, with a faint smile on her lips, 'Vilcaroya, come into the dining-room, I have something to say to you.' She went down the room after the professor and Francis Hartness, and I followed her with beating heart and anxious thoughts, wondering what new lesson it was she was about to teach me. Djama closed and locked the door after us. She led the way to the dining-room, where there was a light burning. It was empty, for the others, hearing what she had said to me, had gone out into the courtyard. Then she turned and faced me with her back to the light; but in spite of that I could see that her eyes were bright, and her fair face flushed as she said to me in a low voice that trembled a little,-- 'Vilcaroya, I am going to forget everything that was said in the room yonder, and--and you must forget it too. It was no time or place for such things to be said, and you and Laurens were not yourselves when you said them. If you do not forget them, we cannot be friends any more. You understand me, don't you?' Gentle and sweetly spoken as the words were, they fell upon my heart like snow upon a fainting flame; yet I felt that, like all her words, they were true and just. I crossed my hands on my breast with one of my old-world gestures, and, standing so before her with bowed head, I said,-- 'The will of Joyful Star is my law. Let what I spoke in my madness be forgotten as you have said. Who am I that I should say such things?--a poor savage that has wandered from his own world into hers, where he is a stranger!' 'No, not a savage, Vilcaroya. You must never say that word again. How could Golden Star's brother be a savage? How could I--but there, we have said enough for the present. We have other things to think of now.'