"He means to use the Iroquois."
I was silent.
"For the honor of your women, you cannot fight such a man," she added, quietly.
"I wish I had the right to protect your honor," I said, so suddenly and so bitterly that I surprised myself.
"Have you not?" she asked, gravely. "I am your kinswoman."
"Yes, yes, I know," I muttered, and fell to plucking at the lace on my wristbands.
The dawn's chill was in the air, the dawn's silence, too, and I saw the calm morning star on the horizon, watching the dark world--the dark, sad world, lying so still, so patient, under the ancient sky.
That melancholy--which is an omen, too--left me benumbed, adrift in a sort of pained contentment which alternately soothed and troubled, so that at moments I almost drowsed, and at moments I heard my heart stirring, as though in dull expectancy of beatitudes undreamed of.
Dorothy, too, sat listless, pensive, and in her eyes a sombre shadow, such as falls on children's eyes at moments, leaving their elders silent.
Once in the false dawn a cock crowed, and the shrill, far cry left the raw air emptier and the silence more profound. I looked wistfully at the maid beside me, chary of intrusion into the intimacy of her silence. Presently her vague eyes met mine, and, as though I had spoken, she said: "What is it?"