hovered above his dreams like a seagull over the course of a stream
which has disappeared into a tunnel.

At last she lifted his head and drew a fold of her skirt beneath it; but
was not yet content; for she knew the weariness of lying on the side
when the unsupported neck and heavy head increase the pressure on the
under shoulder. So once more, to slip her knee beneath the neck for a
pillow, she raised the head--and there came to her heart and breath a
flutter which seemed to make its attack through fingers and up the arms.
She felt, with a difference, the strong, subtle, ineffable thrill of a
woman's early handlings of her earliest child.

In spite of her terror in the night, her danger of the early morning,
the men fighting and the man dead; in spite of the excitement and risks
of the afternoon, shaking the heart in relief only less than in
encounter, and in spite of aching head and limbs, stiffening to cramp
while she still sat and the man still slept, Amaryllis knew herself
happier than ever in her life before.

Not rejoicing in the future--neither in hope nor in fear of what the
sleeper might feel, what ask for, when danger was behind him and
fighting once more a splendid thing belonging to newspapers and books;
instinctively aware, perhaps, that his spirit had moved already half-way
to meet hers, yet so far from asking, even of her own mind, whether Dick
Bellamy loved her or no, that she did not even mentally formulate the
idea of love to explain her own feelings, Amaryllis sat in blissful,
unphilosophic enjoyment of service and protection.

Was she not at once his pillow and his defence? Was he not sleeping like
a little child whose fever has abated? And had she not a dog's ears and
a sailor's eyes for his enemies? And did she not know just where to lay
her hand on the butt of Ockley's pistol, how precious were its two
cartridge's, and how near, therefore, to use each with effect, she must
let an enemy approach?

She was happy, then, and time was nothing, until the man's head moved on
her numbed thigh, and a deep sigh came from his chest.

She leaned over him and lifted the lock of straight black hair which had
fallen over the left eye, stroking it back as he would have brushed it,
and murmuring, "Lie still, dear, lie still," in just such words and
tones as some day she would use to a smaller man on a softer pillow.

But the instinct of the man of many wilds had told him that his hour's
rest was over.