Gabriel answered. "Just as you please. Only, if I stay, you
must promise to stop thinking about the accident, and try to pull
together."

"I promise," she agreed, looking at him with strange eyes. "Oh dear,"
she added, with feminine inconsequentiality, "my hair's all down, and
Lord knows where the pins are!"

He smiled to himself as she managed, with the aid of such few hairpins
as remained, to coil the coppery meshes once more round her head and
even somewhat over the bandage, and secure them in place.

At sight of his face as he watched her, she too smiled wanly--the first
time he had seen a real smile on her mouth.

"I'm only a woman, after all," she apologized. "You don't understand.
You can't. But no matter. Tell me--why need you go, at all?"

"Why? For help, of course."

"There's sure to be a motor, or something, along this road, before very
long," she answered. "Put up some signal or other, to stop it. That will
save you a long, long walk, and save me from--remembering! I need you
here with me," she added earnestly. "Don't go--please!"

"All right, as you will," the man made reply. "I'll rig a danger-signal
on the road; and then all we can do will be to wait."

This plan he immediately put into effect, setting his knapsack in the
middle of the road and piling up brush and limbs of trees about it.

"There," he said to himself, as he surveyed the result, "no car will get
by _that_, without noticing it!"

Then he returned to the sugar-house, some hundred yards back from the
highway in the grove, now already beginning to grow dim with the shadows
of approaching nightfall. The glowing coals of the fire gleamed redly,
through the rough place. The girl, still lying on her bed of leaves and
auto-robes, with the mutilated shawl drawn over her, looked up at him
with an expression of trust and gratitude. For a second, only one,
something quick and vital gripped at the wanderer's heart--some vague,
intangible longing for a home and a woman, a longing old as our race,
deep-planted in the inmost citadel of every man's soul. But,
half-impatiently, he drove the thought away, dismissed it, and, smiling
down at her with cheerful eyes and white, even teeth, said reassuringly:

"Everything's all right now. The first machine that passes, will take
you to civilization."

"And you?" she asked. "What of you, then?"

"Me? Oh, I'll hike," he answered. "I'll plug along just as I was doing
when I found you."

"Where to?"