t Runi wish to keep me with them for other reasons? But he could
not keep me wifeless. I could do much: I could sing and make music; I
was brave and feared nothing; I could teach the children to fight.

He did not say, however, that I could teach anything to one of his years
and attainments.

I protested that he gave me too much praise, that they were just as
brave. Did they not show a courage equal to mine by going every day to
hunt in that wood which was inhabited by the daughter of the Didi?

I came to this subject with fear and trembling, but he took it quietly.
He shook his head, and then all at once began to tell me how they first
came to go there to hunt. He said that a few days after I had secretly
disappeared, two men and a woman, returning home from a distant place
where they had been on a visit to a relation, stopped at the village.
These travellers related that two days' journey from Ytaioa they had
met three persons travelling in an opposite direction: an old man with
a white beard, followed by two yellow dogs, a young man in a big cloak,
and a strange-looking girl. Thus it came to be known that I had left the
wood with the old man and the daughter of the Didi. It was great news to
them, for they did not believe that we had any intention of returning,
and at once they began to hunt in the wood, and went there every day,
killing birds, monkeys, and other animals in numbers.

His words had begun to excite me greatly, but I studied to appear calm
and only slightly interested, so as to draw him on to say more.

"Then we returned," I said at last. "But only two of us, and not
together. I left the old man on the road, and SHE left us in Riolama.
She went away from us into the mountains--who knows whither!"

"But she came back!" he returned, with a gleam of devilish satisfaction
in his eyes that made the blood run cold in my veins.

It was hard to dissemble still, to tempt him to say something that
would madden me! "No, no," I answered, after considering his words. "She
feared to return; she went away to hide herself in the great mountains
beyond Riolama. She could not come back."

"But she came back!" he persisted, with that triumphant gleam in his
eyes once more. Under my cloak my hand had clutched my knife-handle, but
I strove hard against the fierce, almost maddening impulse to pluck it
out and bury it, quick as lightning, in his accursed throat.

He continued: "Seven days before you returned we saw he