“Camilla?” he murmured the word.

“And a very suitable name, it seems to me.  There was, if you remember, a young lady in the Aeneid of pretty much the same disposition.”

“Camilla,” he repeated, and again but a little above his breath.  “Your father . . . he is helping her?”

“Helping her?” I echoed.  “My dear lad, if ever a young woman could take care of herself it is the Princess. . . .  And as for my father helping her, she has packed him off northwards across the mountains with a flea in his ear.  And, talking of fleas—­” I went on with a glance at the hut.

He brought me to a full stop with a sudden grip on my arm, astonishingly strong for a wounded man.

“Nay, lad—­nay!” I coaxed him, but slipped a hand under him as he insisted and sat upright.

“She needs help, I tell you,” he gasped.  “Needs help . . . it was for help I ran when—­when—­”

“But what dreaming is this?  My dear fellow, she makes prisoners of us, shoots you down when you try to escape, treats me worse than a dog, banishes us to this hut which—­not to put too fine a point on it—­is a pigs’-sty, and particularly filthy at that.  I don’t blame her, though some little explanation might not come amiss:  but if she has any need of help, you must admit that she dissembles it pretty thoroughly.”

Nat would not listen.  “You did not see?  You did not see?—­And yet you know her language and have talked with her!  Whereas I—­O blind!” he broke out passionately, “blind that you could not see!”

A fit of coughing seized and shook him, and as I eased him back upon his fern pillow, blood came away upon the handkerchief I held to his lips.

“Damn her!” I swore viciously.  “Let her need help if she will, and let her ask me for it!  She has tried her best to kill you; and what’s more, she’ll succeed if you don’t lie still as I order.  Help?  Oh yes, I’ll help her—­when I have helped you!”

He moved his head feebly, as if to shake it:  but lay quiet, panting, with closed eyes:  and so, the effusion of blood having ceased, I left him and fell to work like a negro slave.

By the angle of the hut there stood a pigs’ trough of granite, roughly hewn and hollowed, and among the tools within I found a leaky wooden bucket which, by daubing it with mud from the brink of the stream, I contrived to make passably watertight.  A score of times I must have travelled to and fro between the hut and the stream before I had the cistern filled.  Then I fell-to upon the foul walls within, slushing and brooming them.  Bats dropped from the roof and flew blundering against me:  I drove them forth from the window.  The mud floor became a quag:  I seized a spade and shovelled it clean, mud and slime and worse filth together.  And still as I toiled a song kept liddening (as we say in Cornwall) through my head:  a song with two refrains, whereof the first was the old nursery jingle—­“Mud