“All right,” 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?”

“Oh, north.”

“What for?”

“Work.  Please don’t question me.  I’d rather you wouldn’t.”

She pondered a moment.

“Are you—­what they call a—­workingman?” she presently resumed.

“Yes,” said he.  “Why?”

“And are you happy?”

“Yes.  In a way.  Or shall be, when I’ve done what I mean to do.”