“Yes, if you wish it.”

Another silence.  Then she shook her head, not looking at him.

“There is no use in going—­now.”

“Why?”

“Because—­because I do not wish it.”  Her eyes fell lower; she drew a long, unsteady breath.  “And because it is too late,” she said.  “You should have gone before I ever knew you—­if I was to be spared my peace of mind.”

Gray came galloping back through the woods, followed by his father and Eudo Stent.  They were rather excited, having found signs of turkey along the mud of a distant branch; and, as they all gathered around a cold luncheon spread beside the wagon, a lively discussion began concerning the relative chances of “roosting” and “yelping.”

Hamil talked as in a dream, scarcely conscious that he was speaking and laughing a great deal.  A heavenly sort of intoxication possessed him; a paradise of divine unrealities seemed to surround him—­Shiela, the clustering pines, the strange white sunlight, the depthless splendour of the unshadowed blue above.

He heard vaguely the voices of the others, Cardross, senior, rallying Gray on his shooting, Gray replying in kind, the soft Southern voices of the guides at their own repast by the picket line, the stir and whisk and crunch of horses nuzzling their feed.

Specks moved in the dome of heaven—­buzzards.  Below, through the woods, myriads of robins were flying about, migrants from the North.

Gray displayed his butterflies; nothing uncommon, except a black and green one seldom found north of Miami—­but they all bent over the lovely fragile creatures, admiring the silver-spangled Dione butterflies, the great velvety black Turnus; and Shiela, with the point of a dry pine needle, traced for Hamil the grotesque dog’s head on the fore wings of those lemon-tinted butterflies which haunt the Florida flat-woods.

“He’d never win at a bench-show,” observed her father, lighting his pipe—­an out-of-door luxury he clung to.  “Shiela, you little minx, what makes you look so unusually pretty?  Probably that wild-west rig of yours.  Hamil, I hope you gave her a few points on grassing a bird.  She’s altogether too conceited.  Do you know, once, while we were picking up singles, a razor-back boar charged us—­or more probably the dogs, which were standing, poor devils.  And upon my word I was so rattled that I did the worst thing possible—­I tried to kick the dogs loose.  Of course they went all to pieces, and I don’t know how it might have fared with us if my little daughter had not calmly bowled over that boar at three paces from my shin-bones!”

“Dad exaggerates,” observed the girl with heightened colour, then ventured a glance at Hamil which set his heart galloping; and her own responded to the tender pride and admiration in his eyes.

There was more discussion concerning “roosting” versus “yelping” with dire designs upon the huge wild turkey-cock whose tracks Gray had discovered in the mud along the branch where their camp was to be pitched.