But already I had overstepped my resolution, although not feeling desperately contrite about it after the sleight-of-hand way that a declaration of love had been changed into the accusation of filching a corn cake. Yet it had been a narrow escape and I thanked my gods for the chance of pulling up, of again getting the right perspective. To tell her anything at all before Echochee came would be the act of an utterly selfish cad, for if she did not want my love--and there was little enough reason to suppose that she did--her position would be intolerable. In such an eventuality never again could we sit beside the fort on nights like this, no longer would she want a cleared path leading to her bailiwick. We would be as two estranged creatures doomed to live near yet apart; each a daily witness of the other's unhappiness; neither able by word or deed to give relief. Ah, I was glad she did not even suspect that I cared a whit for her! I lit my pipe and in moody silence smoked. A pipe stem is a safe thing for man to grip his teeth upon when silence is a virtue. Here in our forest I was master, the undisputed superior force; and I wondered with a fascinating wonder how that ancestor, who climbed down from his tree at nightfall, would have been greeting her! I visualized his cunning face, now peering at me through the ages, leering at me with bared tusks, bidding me take what was my own by right of might! I felt the savage splendor of it. The wildness of this place, its solitude, its distance from mankind, supported me. The cry of a night bird out on the prairie told that it, too, was preying, or being preyed upon; and, as if being stirred by this, a panther sent his wail across the night. I listened for a mate to answer, but she did not. A large, whitish moth flying out of the shadows passed clumsily within a few inches of my face, its wings swishing as a bird's; and it, too, was without a mate. Then, as in the following silence I continued to listen, some far off words came back to me. They came as the scent of lavender comes when rain is pattering on the shingles, and some one opens the old trunk that, ever since you can remember, has stood back under the rafters of the sloping roof; the hallowed old trunk where a veil of yellowing lace is stored--a piece of white satin, a blue or gray faded uniform, and maybe a wee shoe, and a lock of hair. Every one who has leaned above that trunk--and thank God they are legion!--has also listened to a voice coming faintly through the past. And so words out of a lesser past now came to me, as they were meant to be written on a torn wine card: "I am in danger!" She had been in danger of a brute, and had offered the safety of her keeping to me. And the vision of my savage ancestor, though retreating sullenly, faded into nothing. Then I felt her body press against me softly and, looking down, I saw that she had fallen asleep, with her head--precious, trusting thing--resting against my shoulder.