ll. I'll cut you a nice straight path for a nice big feed!"

"And don't leave anything in it, will you, Chancellor! It would be
dreadful to come running to you in the dark, and stumble and--and bump
my nose!"

"Dreadful!" I cried. "It would be the end of the world!"

"Or the end of you," she laughed. "Now get to work, and then you can
build the kitchen fire. Don't you think we might have dinner a little
earlier to-night?"

With this she left me; but how sweetly confidential and domestic that
had sounded: "Don't you think we might have dinner a little earlier
to-night?"

I found her again, sitting on a fallen log and gazing wistfully across
the prairie toward the east, not back in the direction of Efaw Kotee's
den, and I felt that she was thinking of Azuria--her Azuria. What
visions its existence must have opened to her, whose life had been
always passionate after dreams and utterly bored with realities! Yet
what were her dreams?

She saw me and arose slowly, passing one hand across her eyes as if
brushing away the fancies; then I watched an expression almost of
tenderness as she came up to me.

"It isn't quite fair to interrupt," I said, "when you were having such
a peaceful time of it; but the fire's ready, and our supply of
buttonwood shrinks."

"Was I having such a peaceful time of it?" she asked, wonderingly.
"Perhaps it might have been if I knew Echochee and your man are safe.
Anyway, I'm glad the fire's ready; I've been expecting you to call me."

"I wish I could give you the same assurance about them that I feel
myself. Try to think I'm right, won't you?"

"Yes, really I will, good Chancellor," she smiled.

On the way back we passed my pool, where she kneeled ingenuously to
bathe her hands and arms, as chastely innocent as a mermaid.

"Have you such a thing as a towel?" she laughed. "Mine are in the tent!"

I got it, and walked slowly on. And I realized again, what I had once
before noted, that overly refined proprieties--I do not mean proprieties
of the essential kind--cannot endure between man and maid cast alone in
a wilderness. They become frail, insipid; and mar, rather than perfect,
the harmony of existence. Contraversely, their absence adds a deeper
luster, strikes the tuning-fork that hums with the true note of life.
Sorry the man who does not feel a sympathetic vibration! A woman is not
exactly at her best when bathing her face above a porcelain bowl, and to
be the constant, daily witness