Sir Charles raised his feathered hat. "We have been foes," he said, "but the strife is over—and when all is said, we are both Englishmen. I trust we bear each other no ill will."
"I bear none," said Landless.
Sir Charles, his eyes still fixed upon the pale quiet of the other's face, passed out of the opening between the rocks, and his place was taken by the Surveyor-General.
"I would have saved you if I could," he said in a low and troubled voice. "I bow to a brave man and a gallant gentleman," and he too was gone.
In the glade below, the movement, the laughter and the song sank gradually into silence as the gentlemen adventurers, the rangers, Indian guides, and servants composing the rescuing party threw themselves down, one by one, beside the blazing fires for a short rest before moonrise and the long pull down the river.
Among the crags, high above the twinkling watch-fires and the wash of the dark river, there was the stillness of the stars, of the white frost and the bare cliffs. In the northern heavens played a soft light, and now and then a star shot. The man who marked its trail across the studded skies thought of himself as of one as far withdrawn as it from the world of lower lights in the forest at his feet. Already he felt a prescience of the loneliness of the morrow, and the morrow, and the morrow, of the slow drift of the days in the waning forest, the hopeless nights, the terror of that great solitude—and felt, too, a feverish desire to hasten that approach, to embrace that which was to be henceforth bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. He wished for the dash of oars in the dark stream below and for the rise of the moon which was to shine coldly down upon him, companionless, immured in that vast fortress from which he might never hope to escape.
The sound of cautious footsteps among the rocks brought his sick and wandering fancy back to the present. Raising himself upon his elbow and peering intently into the darkness, he made out two figures, one tall and large, the other much slighter, advancing towards him. Presently the larger figure stopped short, and, seating itself upon a flat rock at the brink of the hill, turned its face towards the fires in the woods below. The other came on lightly and hurriedly—another moment, and rising to his knees, he clasped her in his arms and laid his head upon her bosom.
"I never thought to see you again," he said at last.
"I made Regulus bring me," she answered. "The others do not know—they think me asleep."
She spoke in a low, even, monotonous voice, and the hand which she laid upon his forehead was like marble. "My heart is dead, I think," she said. "I wish my body were so too."