Through the intense stillness I could still hear the woman sobbing in the dark below.

“Lois — little Lois,” I whispered, touching her trembling arm with a hand quite as unsteady.

She dropped her arm from her face, looking up at me with eyes widened still in horror.

I said: “Do you then wonder that the thought of you, roaming these woods alone, is become a living dread to me, so that I think of nothing else?”

She smiled wanly, and sat thinking for a while, her pale face pressed between her hands. Presently she looked up.

“Are we so truly friends then, Euan? At the Spring Waiontha it almost seemed as though it could come true.”