When she joined him a few minutes later, coming up the slope slowly, she looked tired, he thought, and listless. She sat down and watched him finishing his labors; all of her spontaneous gaiety had fled; she was silent and did not smile and appeared preoccupied. She sighed two or three times, unconsciously, but her sighs did not escape him. Always he had held her sex to be an utterly baffling, though none the less an equally fascinating one. Now he would have given more than a little for a clew to her thoughts ... or dreamings ... or vague preoccupation.... "My lady's bower!" he said lightly. "And what does my lady have to say of it?" A truly bowery little shelter it was, on leaning poles in an inverted V, with leafy boughs making thick walls, through which only slender sun-rays slipped in a golden dust; within a high-heaped pile of fragrant boughs, with a heap of smaller green twigs and resinous pine-tips for her couch. "You are so good to me, Babe Deveril," was her grave answer. And not altogether did her answer please him, for a quick hint of frown touched his eyes, though he banished it almost before she was sure of it. Those words of hers, though they thanked him, most of all reminded him of his goodness and gentleness with her, and thus went farther and assured him that she still counted upon his goodness and gentleness. "I am afraid, Babe Deveril," she added quickly, though still her eyes were grave and her lips unsmiling, "that I am pretty well tired out ... all sort of let-down like, as an old miner I once knew used to say! It's going to be sundown in a few minutes; can't we treat ourselves to the luxury of a good blazing camp-fire, and sit by it, and get good and warm and rested?" Had she spoken her true thought she would have cried out instead: "What troubles me, Babe Deveril, is that I am half afraid of you. And, all of a sudden, of the wilderness. And of life and of all the mysteries of the unknown! I am as near screaming from sheer nervousness at this instant as I ever was in my life." But Deveril, who could glean of her emotions only what she allowed to lie among her spoken words, cried heartily: "You just bet your sweet life we'll have a crackling, roaring fire. Taggart and his crowd are half a dozen miles away right now and still going; our fire down in that hollow will never cast a gleam over the big ridge yonder and the other ridges which lie in between him and us. Come ahead, my dear; here's for a real bonfire." That "my dear" escaped him; but she did not appear to have noted it. She rose and followed him back to their dying fire. He began piling on dead branches; they caught and crackled and shot showering sparks aloft. He brought more fuel, laying it close by. Already the blaze had driven her back; she sat down by a pine, her knees in her hands, her head tipped forward so that her face was shadowed, her two curly braids over her shoulders. Deveril lay near her, his hand palming his chin.