Turning to lead Hortense away before Le Borgne
and the blackamoor began filling the grave, I found her stonily silent
and tearless.
But it was she who led me.
Scrambling up the hillside like a chamois of the mountains, she flitted
lightly through the greening to a small open where campers had built
night fires. Her quick glance ran from tree to tree. Some wood-runner
had blazed a trail by notching the bark. Pausing, she turned with the
frank, fearless look of the wilderness woman. She was no longer the
elusive Hortense of secluded life. A change had come--the change of
the hothouse plant set out to the bufferings of the four winds of
heaven to perish from weakness or gather strength from hardship. Your
woman of older lands must hood fair eyes, perforce, lest evil masking
under other eyes give wrong intent to candour; but in the wilderness
each life stands stripped of pretence, honestly good or evil, bare at
what it is; and purity clear as the noonday sun needs no trick of
custom to make it plainer.
"Is not this the place?" she asked.
Looking closer, from shrub to open, I recognised the ground of that
night attack in the woods.
"Hortense, then it was you that I saw at the fire with the others?"
She nodded assent.
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