"But I shall accompany you, dearest."
"No, I must go as I came—alone."
"But Nellie"—
"I tell you no," she said, with an almost harsh practical decision, incompatible with her previous abandonment. "We might be seen together."
"Well, suppose we are; we must be seen together eventually," he remonstrated.
The young girl made an involuntary gesture of impatient negation, but checked herself. "Don't let us talk of that now. Come, while I am here under your own roof"—she pointed to the high interlaced boughs above them—"you must be hospitable. Show me your home; tell me, isn't it a little gloomy sometimes?"
"It never has been; I never thought it would be until the moment you leave it to-day."
She pressed his hand briefly and in a half-perfunctory way, as if her vanity had accepted and dismissed the compliment. "Take me somewhere," she said inquisitively, "where you stay most; I do not seem to see you here," she added, looking around her with a slight shiver. "It is so big and so high. Have you no place where you eat and rest and sleep?"
"Except in the rainy season, I camp all over the place—at any spot where I may have been shooting or collecting."
"Collecting?" queried Nellie.