With this she left me; but how sweetly confidential and domestic that had sounded: "Don't you think we might have dinner a little earlier to-night?"
I found her again, sitting on a fallen log and gazing wistfully across the prairie toward the east, not back in the direction of Efaw Kotee's den, and I felt that she was thinking of Azuria—her Azuria. What visions its existence must have opened to her, whose life had been always passionate after dreams and utterly bored with realities! Yet what were her dreams?
She saw me and arose slowly, passing one hand across her eyes as if brushing away the fancies; then I watched an expression almost of tenderness as she came up to me.
"It isn't quite fair to interrupt," I said, "when you were having such a peaceful time of it; but the fire's ready, and our supply of buttonwood shrinks."
"Was I having such a peaceful time of it?" she asked, wonderingly. "Perhaps it might have been if I knew Echochee and your man are safe. Anyway, I'm glad the fire's ready; I've been expecting you to call me."
"I wish I could give you the same assurance about them that I feel myself. Try to think I'm right, won't you?"
"Yes, really I will, good Chancellor," she smiled.
On the way back we passed my pool, where she kneeled ingenuously to bathe her hands and arms, as chastely innocent as a mermaid.
"Have you such a thing as a towel?" she laughed. "Mine are in the tent!"
I got it, and walked slowly on. And I realized again, what I had once before noted, that overly refined proprieties—I do not mean proprieties of the essential kind—cannot endure between man and maid cast alone in a wilderness. They become frail, insipid; and mar, rather than perfect, the harmony of existence. Contraversely, their absence adds a deeper luster, strikes the tuning-fork that hums with the true note of life. Sorry the man who does not feel a sympathetic vibration! A woman is not exactly at her best when bathing her face above a porcelain bowl, and to be the constant, daily witness of such ablutions would, in my limited experience, engender a slight unrest among the tuneful Nine. Yet let her gracefully lean above a woodland pool, roll back her sleeves and open the collar of her shooting shirt, and she becomes a personification of glory to him who waits near the fire he has built for their evening meal. But she must have looked danger in the face with him, slept near him beneath the stars; knowing, should she be affrighted in the night, that her call will bring his reassuring answer, but also knowing that the voice is all that will ever come unbidden to her side. And thus is the Cave-man in him gloriously aroused to guard her from Nature's wild, while the poetry of their intercourse guards her from himself. What more beautiful existence than to live alone in a forest with the girl you love!