ing happens."

"You wouldn't dare," said Nick.

"I suppose that means you are afraid to trust me," she said.

He turned at that. "It means nothing of the sort. But you've had one
scare, and you may have another. I think myself that that fellow was
a scout on the look-out for Bassett's advance guard. But Heaven only
knows what brought him to this place, and there may be others. That's
why I didn't dare to shoot."

He paused, his light eyebrows raised, surveying her questioningly; for
Muriel had suddenly covered her face with both hands. But in another
moment she looked up again, and spoke with an effort.

"Your being awake couldn't lessen the danger. Won't you--please--be
reasonable about it? I am doing my best."

There was a deep note of appeal in her voice, and abruptly Nick gave
in.

He moved back to their resting-place without another word, and flung
himself face downwards beside the nest of fern that he had made for
her, lying stretched at full length like a log.

She had not expected so sudden and complete a surrender. It took her
unawares, and she stood looking down at him, uncertain how to proceed.

But after a few seconds he turned his head towards her and spoke.

"You'll stay by me, Muriel?"

"Of course," she answered, that unwonted sense of responsibility still
strongly urging her.

He murmured something unintelligible, and stirred uneasily. She knew
in a flash what he wanted, but a sick sense of dread held her back.
She felt during the silence that followed as though he were pleading
with her, urging her, even entreating her. Yet still she resisted,
standing near him indeed, but with a desperate reluctance at her
heart, a shrinking unutterable from the bare thought of any closer
proximity to him that was as the instinctive recoil of purity from a
thing unclean.

The horror of his deed had returned upon her over-whelmingly with his
brief reference to it. His lack of emotion seemed to her as hideous
callousness, more horrible than the deed itself. His physical
exhaustion had called her out of herself, but the reaction was doubly
terrible.

Nick said no more. He lay quite motionless, hardly seeming to breathe,
and she realised that there was no repose in his attitude. He was not
even trying to rest.

She wrung her hands together. It could not go on, this tension. Either
she must yield to his unspoken desire, or he would sit up and cry
off the bargain. And she knew that sleep was a necessity t