d I were casting
about how we could compass the bringing of a doctor from the
settlements, the fever took a turn for the better,--of its own accord,
or for Uncanoola's physickings, we knew not which,--and at the end of
the third week Dick was up and able to ride again, this time without the
forked stick to hold him in the saddle.

After this we went on without mishap, and with no hardship greater than
that of living solely upon the meat victual provided by the hunter's
rifle; and you who know this plough-dressed region at this later day
will wonder when I write it down that in all that long faring, or rather
to the last day's stage of it, we saw never a face of any of our kind,
or of the Catawba's.

You may be sure the month or more we spent thus in the heart of the
wildwood was but a sorry time for me. While the excitement of the
pursuit and rescue lasted, and later, when anxiety for Richard filled
the hours of the long days and nights, I was held a little back from
slipping into that pit of despair which I had digged for myself.

But when the strain was off and Dick was up and fit again, the misery
of it all came back with added goadings. I had never dreamed how cutting
sharp 'twould be to see these two together day by day; to see her
loving, tender care of him, and to hear him babble of his love for her
in his feverish vaporings. Yet all this I must endure, and with it a
thing even harder. For, to make it worse, if worse could be, the shadow
of complete estrangement had fallen between Margery and me. True to her
word, given in that moment when I had besought her not to speak aloud
for her own safety's sake, she had never opened her lips to me; and for
aught she said or did I might have been a deaf-mute slave beneath her
notice.

And as she drew away from me, she seemed to draw the closer to Richard
Jennifer, nursing him alive when he was at his worst, and giving him all
the womanly care and sympathy a sick man longs for. And later, when he
was fit to ride again, she had him always at her side in the onward
faring.

As I have said before, this was all as I would have it. Yet it made me
sick in my soul's soul; and at times I must needs fall behind to rave it
out in solitude, cursing the day that I was born, and that other more
misfortunate day when I had reared the barrier impassable between these
two.

What wonder, then, that, as we neared the fighting field of the great
war, I grew more set upon seizing the f