on the soothing
earth, desiring sleep; and four hours shalt thou look within thine own
breast, thinking of thy sin; four hours also shalt thou go through the
valley, calling out that thou art lost, and praying the Scarlet Hunter
to bring thee home. Afterwards thou shalt sleep, and thou shalt comfort
thyself with food when thou wilt. If the Scarlet Hunter comes not, and
thy life faileth for misery, and none comprehending thy state offereth
his life, that thy soul may be free once more--then thou shalt gladly
die, and, yielding thine own body, shall purchase back thy soul; but
this is not possible until thou hast dwelt here a year and a day."

Having read, the girl threw herself face forward on the ground, her body
shaking with grief, and she cried out a man's name many times with great
bitterness "Ambroise! Ambroise! Ambroise!"

A long time she lay prone, crying so; but at last arose and, folding
back the curtain with hot hands, began her vigil for the redemption of a
soul.

And while her sorrow grew, a father mourned for his daughter and called
his God to witness that he was guiltless of her loss, though he had said
hard words to her by reason of a man called Ambroise. Then, too, the
preacher had exhorted her late and early till her mind was in a maze--it
is enough to have the pangs of youth and love, to be awakened by the
pain of mere growth and knowledge, without the counsel of the overwise
to go jolting through the soul.

The girl was only eighteen. She had never known her mother, she had
lived as the flowers do, and when her hour of trial came she felt
herself cast like a wandering bird out of the nest. In her childhood she
had known no preachers, no teaching, save the wholesome catechism of a
father's love and the sacred intimacy of Nature. Living so, learning by
signs the language of law and wisdom, she had indrawn the significance
of legend, the power of the awful natural. She had made her own
commandments.

When Ambroise the courier came, she had looked into his eyes and seen
her own--indeed, it was most wonderful, for those two pairs of eyes were
as those of one person. And each, as each looked, smiled--that smile
which is the coming laughter of a heart at itself. Yet they were
different--he a man, she a woman; he versed in evil, she taught in
good; he a vagrant of the snows, the fruit of whose life was like the
contemptible stones of the desert; she the keeper of a goodly lodge,
past which flowed a water