Her words were commonplace, yet her cheeks wore an angry flush beneath their sun-burn; and I knew why.  Her insult had miscarried.  In accepting this humiliation I had somehow mastered her:  even the tone she used, level and matter-of-fact, she used perforce, in place of the high scorn with which she had started to sentence me.  My spirits rose.  If I could not understand this girl, neither could she understand me.  She only felt defeat, and it puzzled and angered her.

“You have no complaint to make?” she asked, hesitating in spite of herself as she turned to go.

I laughed, having discovered that my laugh perplexed her.

“None whatever, Princess.  Am I not your hostage?”

When they were gone I laughed again, with a glance at Nat who lay with closed eyes and white still face where Marc’antonio and Stephanu had made a couch of fern and some heather for him under the chestnut boughs.  The sight of the heather gave me an idea, and I walked back to where, at the end of the chestnut wood, a noble clump of it grew, under a scarp of rock where the pines broke off.  With my knife I cut an armful of it and returned to the hut, pausing on my way to gather some strings of a creeper which looked to be a clematis and sufficiently tough for my purpose.  My next step was to choose and cut a tolerably straight staff of ilex, about five feet in length and close upon two inches thick.  While I trimmed it, a blackbird began to sing in the undergrowth behind the hut, and, listening, my ears seemed to catch in the pauses of his song a sound of running water, less loud but nearer and more distinct than the murmur of the many rock-streams that tinkled into the valley.  I dropped my work for a while and, passing to the back of the hut, found and followed through the bushes a foot-track—­overgrown and tangled with briers, but still a track—­which led me to the water.  It ran, with a murmur almost subterranean, beneath bushes so closely over-arched that my feet were on the brink before I guessed, and I came close upon taking a bath at unawares.  Now this stream, so handy within reach, was just what I wanted, and among the bushes by the verge grew a plant—­much like our English osier, but dwarfer—­extremely pliant and tougher than the tendrils of the clematis; so, that, having stripped it of half a dozen twigs, I went back to work more blithely than ever.

But for fear of disturbing Nat I could have whistled.  It may even be that, intent on my task, I did unwittingly whistle a few bars of a tune:  or perhaps the blackbird woke him.  At any rate, after half an hour’s labour I looked up from my handiwork and met his eyes, open, intent on me and with a question in them.

“What am I doing, eh?  I am making a broom, lad,” I held it up for him to admire.

“Where is she?” he asked feebly.

“She?” I set down my broom, fetched him a pannikin-ful of milk, and knelt beside him while he drank it.  “If you mean the Princess Camilla, she has gone back to her mountain, leaving us in peace.”