"Nonsense. We're quits anyway. Do you remember what I did to you?"
He was thinking of the handcuffs. Then, in her vivid blush he read what she was thinking. And he remembered his lips on her palms.
He, too, now was blushing brilliantly at the memory of that swift, sudden rush of romantic tenderness which this girl had witnessed that memorable day on Owl Marsh.
In the hot, uncomfortable silence, neither spoke. He seated himself after a while. And, after a while, she turned on her pillow part way toward him.
Somehow they both understood that it was friendship which had subtly filled the interval that separated them since that amazing day.
"I've often thought of you," he said, — as though they had been discussing his absence.
No hour of the waking day that she had not thought of him. But she did not say so now. After a little while:
"Is yours a lonely life?" she asked in a low voice.
"Sometimes. But I love the forest."
"Sometimes," she said, "the forest seems like a trap that I can't escape. Sometimes I hate it."