e added quietly. "The man was Philip
Poynter."

Ronador caught her hands again with fierce resolve. His eyes were
blazing with excitement and anger at the utter faith in her voice.

"Why do you think I adopted the stained face--the disguise of a
wandering minstrel?" he demanded impetuously. "It was to free myself
from his infernal spying--to afford myself the opportunity of gaining
your friendship without his knowledge! Why did he follow--always
follow? Because at the command of his chief, he must needs obstruct my
plan of winning you. There was always Princess Phaedra! Why did he
watch by night in the forest. To spy! Can you not see it?"

"Surely, surely," said Diane, "you must be wrong!"

But Ronador could not be wrong. Themar, his servant, whom he had
dispatched to seek employment with the Baron when the fortunes of the
road had made further attendance upon himself inconvenient, had learned
of the hay-camp and of Poynter's pledge to make his victim's advances
ridiculous in the eyes of Diane.

"And when Themar followed--to warn me--Poynter beat him brutally," he
went on fiercely, "beat him and sent him in a dirty barge to a distant
city. All the while when I fancied my disguise impenetrable, he was
laughing in his sleeve, for he is as clever as he is unscrupulous. He
was even meeting his chief in a Kentucky woods to report. Tregar
admitted it. Why did he make me ridiculous at the Sherrill fete?
Purely because your eyes, Miss Westfall, were among those who watched
the indignity! Why is he driving about now in the music-machine to
mock me? Because having forced me from the road, he must needs see to
it that I do not return. When I do, he must be near at hand to report
to the Baron."

It was an artful network. Somehow, by virtue of the sinister skeleton
of facts underlying the velvet of his logic, it rang true. Diane, as
colorless as a flower, sat utterly silent, slender brown fingers
tightened against the palms of her hands.

Philip false! Philip a spy! Philip--almost a murderer! It could not
be!

Yet how insistently he had striven to force her to return to
civilization. Away from Ronador? It might be. How insistently the
Baron had urged him to linger in her camp! _To spy_? A great wave of
faintness swept over her. And there was Arcadia and the hay-camp and
the mildly impudent indignities--they all slipped accurately into place.

"I--I do not know!" she faltered at last in answer t