"They'll take me for him, don't you see? I'll lead them a lovely goose chase—I bet I know this country better than they do! There's the Grotte des Fées, if the worst comes to the worst. They'll think he's gone off quite in the other direction—else, do you imagine we'd ever possibly be able to hide him, with the hue and cry there'd be? Good-by, darling, darling—" She flung herself down beside Denis, lavishing her whole heart on him, baring her soul, unveiling the holy of holies, the white fire of very love. Then, standing up, she held out both hands to Lettice; and in her face, unearthly bright yet grave, Lettice did visibly behold this mortal putting on immortality.
"It's—it's a frightful risk," she said.
Dorothea's gravity broke up into a laugh of pure glee.
"Yes, that's the very cream of it!" she cried. "Oh! I have wanted to do something like a soldier, and now I've got the chance. Oh! and Denis has forgiven me, he's taken me back again—oh! I do think I'm the very luckiest girl in all the world!"
She caught Lettice close and kissed her vehemently, and then fled down the hill, buckling her cap as she ran.
CHAPTER XXXII PER ARDUA AD ASTRA
Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us; and to the hills, Cover us.—St. Luke.
In the days of her not far distant childhood Dorothea had never loved any game like hide-and-seek; she flung herself into her present escapade with much the same zest and little more discretion. Her plan, so far as she had one, was to lie up in the fir wood till a search-party appeared, then show herself and give them a lead away from the farm. The rest she left to chance, naïvely confident that the luck which had sent Denis to her would let her save him. She had had enough hard knocks, one might have thought, to convince her that Fate does not necessarily favor the young and hopeful; but that was a lesson Dorothea never had learned, and never would.