Gods Country--And the Woman | Page 9

and gold billows of forest that melted away against the distant sky he felt a new and glorious fire throbbing in his veins. From the forests their eyes turned-- and met. He held out his hand. And slowly her own hand fluttered at her breast, and was given to him.
"I am quite sure that I understand you now," he said, and his voice was the low, steady, fighting voice of the man new-born. "I will be your knight, as you have read of the knights of old. I will urge no reward that is not freely given. Now--will you let me help you?"
For a moment she allowed him to hold her hand. Then she gently withdrew it and stepped back from him.
"You must first understand before you offer yourself," she said. "I cannot tell you what my trouble is. You will never know. And when it is over, when you have helped me across the abyss, then will come the greatest trial of all for you. I believe--when I tell you that last thing which you must do--that you will regard me as a monster, and draw back. But it is necessary. If you fight for me, it must be in the dark. You will not know why you are doing the things I ask you to do. You may guess, but you would not guess the truth if you lived a thousand years. Your one reward will be the knowledge that you have fought for a woman, and that you have saved her. Now, do you still want to help me?'
"I can't understand," he gasped. "But--yes--I would still accept the inevitable. I have promised you that I will do as you have dreamed that knights of old have done. To leave you now would be" --he turned his head with a gesture of hopelessness--"an empty world forever. I have told you now. But you could not understand and believe unless I did. I love you."
He spoke as quietly and with as little passion in his voice as if he were speaking the words from a book. But their very quietness made them convincing. She started, and the colour left her face. Then it returned, flooding her cheeks with a feverish glow.
"In that is the danger," she said quickly. "But you have spoken the words as I would have had you speak them. It is this danger that must be buried--deep--deep. And you will bury it. You will urge no questions that I do not wish to answer. You will fight for me, blindly, knowing only that what I ask you to do is not sinful nor wrong. And in the end--"
She hesitated. Her face had grown as tense as his own.
"And in the end," she whispered, "your greatest reward can be only the knowledge that in living this knighthood for me you have won what I can never give to any man. The world can hold only one such man for a woman. For your faith must be immeasurable, your love as pure as the withered violets out there among the rocks if you live up to the tests ahead of you. You will think me mad when I have finished. But I am sane. Off there, in the Snowbird Lake country, is my home. I am alone. No other white man or woman is with me. As my knight, the one hope of salvation that I cling to now, you will return with me to that place--as my husband. To all but ourselves we shall be man and wife. I will bear your name--or the one by which you must be known. And at the very end of all, in that hour of triumph when you know that you have borne me safely over that abyss at the brink of which I am hovering now, you will go off into the forest, and--"
She approached him, and laid a hand on his arm. "You will not come back," she finished, so gently that he scarcely heard her words. "You will die--for me--for all who have known you."
"Good God!" he breathed, and he stared over her head to where the red and gold billows of the forests seemed to melt away into the skies.
CHAPTER FOUR
Thus they stood for many seconds. Never for an instant did her eyes leave his face, and Philip looked straight over her head into that distant radiance of the forest mountains. It was she whose emotions revealed themselves now. The blood came and went in her cheeks. The soft lace at her throat rose and fell swiftly. In her eyes and face there was a thing which she had not dared to reveal to him before--a prayerful, pleading anxiety that was almost ready to break into tears.
At last she had come to see and believe in