And now, as always, he wondered how this fair young girl could find courage to smile in the very presence of the most dreadful death any living woman could suffer—death from the Hun.
He lay looking at her and she at him, for a while.
In the silence, a dry stick snapped and McKay was on his feet as though it had been the crack of a pistol.
Presently he stooped, and she lifted her pretty head and rested one ear close to his lips:
"It's that roebuck, I think, down stream." Then something happened; her ear touched his mouth—or his lips, forming some word, came into contact with her—so that it was as though he had kissed her and she had responded.
Both recoiled; her face was bright with mounting colour and he seemed scared. Yet both knew it was not a caress; but she feared he thought she had invited one, and he feared she believed he had offered one.
He went about his affair with the theoretical roebuck in silence, picking up one of his pistols, loosening his knife in its sheath; then, without the usual smile or gesture for her, he started off noiselessly over the moss.
And the girl, supporting herself on one arm, her fingers buried in the moss, looked after him while her flushed face cooled.
McKay moved down stream with pistol lifted, scanning the hard-wood ridges on either hand. For even the reddest of roe deer, in the woods, seem to be amazingly invisible unless they move.
The stream dashed through shadow and sun-spot, splashing a sparkling way straight into the wilderness of Les Errues; and along its fern-fringed banks strode McKay with swift, light steps. His eyes, now sharpened by the fight for life—which life had begun to be revealed to him in all its protean aspects, searched the dappled, demi-light ahead, fiercely seeking to pierce any disguise that protective colouration might afford his quarry.