quick, fierce tenderness, blushing as she drew it back, as if she had
forgotten herself, and from her heart caressed him. She heard a sound at
the other side of a bend in the hill, a low drone, like somebody
mumbling a hymn.

She pushed her way through the thicket: the moon did not shine there;
there was a dark crevice in the hill, where some farmer's boy had built
a shed. There was a fire in it, now, smouldering, as though whoever made
it feared its red light would be seen by the distant pickets. Coming up
to it, she stood in the door-way. Douglas Palmer lay on a heap of
blankets on the ground: she could not see his face, for a lank, slothful
figure was stooping over him, chafing his head. It was Gaunt. Dode went
in, and knelt down beside the wounded man,--quietly: it seemed to her
natural and right she should be there. Palmer's eyes were shut, his
breathing heavy, uncertain; but his clothes were dried, and his side was
bandaged.

"It was only a flesh-wound," said Gaunt, in his vague way,--"deep,
though. I knew how to bind it. He'll live, Douglas will."

He did not seem surprised to see the girl. Nothing could be so bizarre
in the world, that his cloudy, crotchety brain did not accept it, and
make a commonplace matter out of it. It never occurred to him to wonder
how she came there. He stood with folded arms, his bony shoulders
bolstering up the board wall, watching her as she knelt, her hands on
Palmer's pillow, but not touching him. Gaunt's lean face had a pitiful
look, sometimes,--the look of the child he was in his heart,--hungry,
wistful, as though he sought for something, which you might have,
perhaps. He looked at Dode,--the child of the man that he had killed.
She did not know that. When she came in, he thought of shaking hands