“You are afraid of nothing.  I knew it!” she exclaimed with pride.  “Nor would there be much danger.  We will go to the other side of the island where the waves run high and the cliffs are tall and black.  There will I show you the nests of the great eagles, and the antelope leaping among the rocks.  And, — who can tell?” she laughed again with child-like pleasure, “perhaps we shall find a white otter!”

And, true to her word, he heard at dawn next day outside the cavern the whistle of a blackbird, a signal early contrived between them.  She deemed it best, she explained, to start thus early that the darkness might conceal them until they had passed well beyond the outskirts of the village.  But this danger overcome, they spent the whole day rambling fearlessly among the hills, — a long, idle, happy day.  Up many a dim trail winding back into the canyons the princess led him.  Through golden thickets of wild mustard they passed, coming, when he least expected it, upon glimpses of the summer sea framed between the branches of knarled old oak trees.

“They are low and crooked, and they spread themselves over the ground as do our English oaks,” the young nobleman informed her.

As Wildenai had promised they discovered, poised high among the crags of the wild southern shore, the great eagles of which she had told him, measuring easily, from wing-tip to wing-tip, fully a dozen feet.  The white otter, rarest and most valuable of all the game hunted by her people, eluded them, but many a small gray fox slipped away among the bushes, leaving the Englishman tingling for the chase.

At twilight, as they made their way back to the cavern, they came upon a tiny lake lying asleep within the crater of a dead volcano.  From the sides little clouds of ashes rose, floating softly away on the breezes of evening.  The princess gathered a handful and murmuring some musical words in her own tongue she threw them into the air.

“And would it be amiss for me to ask what ’tis you do?” questioned her companion, observing her closely.

“I was sending a prayer to Wakan-ate, the Great Spirit,” she replied quietly.

“A prayer, — and borne to heaven on the wings of ashes!” He seemed amused.  “But what hast thou to pray for, oh fair princess?”

Her cheeks glowing with quick color, she replied:  “It were not fitting that any maiden tell for what she prays!”

The words were spoken with such gravity that the young man flushed under the rebuke.

When she left him at the doorway of the cavern that evening she said as she made a gay little gesture of farewell:  “Today the land, but tomorrow we shall find still more beautiful things that lie hidden under the deep waters.  You shall see!”

And once again with dawn she came.  This time it was the splash of a paddle that brought him to the opening in the rock.

“Aloho-ate, lazy one!” she called gaily from below.  “Make haste!  The world is always loveliest while it lies waiting for the sun!”