A leap of the heart and dizziness shot through me and blurred my sight. The reality of Madame de Ferrier's coming to seek me surpassed all imaginings. She walked with quick accustomed step, parting the second growth in her way, having tracked me from the boat. Seeing my lodge in the ravine she paused, her face changing as the lake changes; and caught her breath. I stood exultant and ashamed down to the ground. "Monsieur, what are you doing here?" Madame de Ferrier cried out. "Living, madame," I responded. "Living? Do you mean you have returned to your old habits?" "I have returned to the woods, madame." "You do not intend to stay here?" "Perhaps." "You must not do it!" "What must I do?" "Come back to the house. You have given us much anxiety." I liked the word "us" until I remembered it included Count de Chaumont. "Why did you come out here and hide yourself?" My conduct appeared contemptible. I looked mutely at her. "What offended you?" "Nothing, madame." "Did you want Doctor Chantry to lame himself hobbling around in search of you, and the count to send people out in every direction?" "No, madame." "What explanation will you make to the count?" "None, madame." I raised my head. "I may go out in the woods without asking leave of Count de Chaumont." "He says you have forsaken your books and gone back to be an Indian." I showed her the Latin book in my hand. She glanced slightly at it, and continued to make her gray eyes pass through my marrow. Shifting like a culprit, I inquired: "How did you know I was here?" "Oh, it was not hard to find you after I saw the boat. This island is not large." "But who rowed you across the lake, madame?" "I came by myself, and nobody except Ernestine knows it. I can row a boat. I slipped through the tunnel, and ventured." "Madame, I am a great fool. I am not worth your venturing." "You are worth any danger I might encounter. But you should at least go back for me." "I will do anything for you, madame. But why should I go back?--you will not long be there." "What does that matter? The important thing is that you should not lapse again into the Indian." "Is any life but the life of an Indian open to me, madame?" She struck her hands together with a scream. "Louis! Sire!" Startled, I dropped the book and it sprawled at her feet like the open missal. She had returned so unexpectedly to the spirit of our first meeting. "O, if you knew what you are! During my whole life your name has been cherished by my family. We believed you would sometime come to your own. Believe in yourself!" I seemed almost to remember and perceive what I was--as you see in mirage one inverted boat poised on another, and are not quite sure, and the strange thing is gone. Perhaps I was less sure of the past because I was so sure of the present. A wisp of brown mist settling among the trees spread cloud behind her. What I wanted was this woman, to hide in the woods for my own. I could feed and clothe her, deck her with necklaces of garnets from the rocks, and wreaths of the delicate sand-wort flower. She said she would rather make Paul a woodchopper than a suppliant, taking the constitutional oath. I could make him a hunter and a fisherman. Game, bass, trout, pickerel, grew for us in abundance. I saw this vision with a single eye; it looked so possible! All the crude imaginings of youth colored the spring woods with vivid beauty. My face betrayed me, and she spoke to me coldly. "Is that your house, monsieur?" I said it was. "And you slept there last night?" "I can build a much better one." "What did you have for dinner?" "Nothing." "What did you have for breakfast?" "Nothing." Evidently the life I proposed to myself to offer her would not suit my lady! She took a lacquered box from the cover of her wrappings, and moved down the slope a few steps. "Come here to your mother and get your supper." I felt tears rush to my eyes. She sat down, spread a square of clean fringed linen upon the ground, and laid out crusty rounds of buttered bread that were fragrant in the springing fragrance of the woods, firm slices of cold meat, and a cunning pastry which instantly maddened me. I was ashamed to be such a wolf. We sat with our forest table between us and ate together. "I am hungry myself," she said. A glorified veil descended on the world. If evening had paused while that meal was in progress it would not have surprised me. There are half hours that dilate to the importance of centuries. But when she had encouraged me to eat everything to the last crumb, she shook the fringed napkin, gathered up the lacquered box, and said she must be gone. "Monsieur, I have overstepped the bounds of behavior in coming after you. The case was too urgent for consideration of myself. I must hurry back, for the count's people would not understand my secret errand through the tunnel. Will you show yourself at the house as soon as possible?" I told her humbly that I would. "But let me put you in the boat, madame." She shook her head. "You may follow, after I am out of sight. If you fail to follow"--she turned in the act of departing and looked me through. I told her I would not fail. When Madame de Ferrier disappeared beyond the bushes I sat down and waited with my head between my hands, still seeing upon closed eyelids her figure, the scant frock drawn around it, her cap of dark hair under a hood, her face moving from change to change. And whether I sat a year or a minute, clouds had descended when I looked, as they often did in that lake gorge. So I waited no longer, but followed her. The fog was brown, and capped the evening like a solid dome, pressing down to the earth, and twisting smoke fashion around my feet. It threw sinuous arms in front of me as a thing endowed with life and capable of molding itself; and when I reached my boat and pushed off on the water, a vast mass received and enveloped me. More penetrating than its clamminess was the thought that Madame de Ferrier was out in it alone. I tried one of the long calls we sometimes used in hunting. She might hear, and understand that I was near to help her. But it was shouting against many walls. No effort pierced the muffling substance which rolled thickly against the lungs. Remembering it was possible to override smaller craft, I pulled with caution, and so bumped lightly against the boat that by lucky chance hovered in my track. "Is it you, madame?" I asked. She hesitated. "Is it you, monsieur?" "Yes." "I think I am lost. There is no shore. The fog closed around me so soon. I was waiting for it to lift a little." "It may not lift until morning, madame. Let me tie your boat to mine." "Do you know the way?" "There is no way. We shall have to feel for the shore. But Lake George is narrow, and I know it well." "I want to keep near you." "Come into my boat, and let me tie the other one astern." She hesitated again, but decided, "That would be best." I drew the frail shells together--they seemed very frail above such depths--and helped her cross the edges. We were probably the only people on Lake George. Tinder lighted in one boat would scarcely have shown us the other, though in the sky an oval moon began to make itself seen amidst rags of fog. The dense eclipse around us and the changing light overhead were very weird. Madame de Ferrier's hands chilled mine, and she shook in her thin cape and hood. Our garments were saturated. I felt moisture trickling down my hair and dropping on my shoulders. She was full of vital courage, resisting the deadly chill. This was not a summer fog, lightly to be traversed. It went dank through the bones. When I had helped her to a bench, remembering there was nothing dry to wrap around her, I slipped off my coat and forcibly added its thickness to her shoulders. "Do you think I will let you do that, monsieur?" My teeth chattered and shocked together so it was impossible to keep from laughing, as I told her I always preferred to be coatless when I rowed a boat. We could see each other by the high light that sometimes gilded the face, and sometimes was tarnished almost to eclipse. Madame de Ferrier crept forward, and before I knew her intention, cast my garment again around me. I helped the boat shift its balance so she would have to grasp at me for support; the chilled round shape of her arm in my hand sent waves of fire through me. With brazen cunning, moreover, that surprised myself, instead of pleading, I dictated. "Sit beside me on the rower's bench, madame, and the coat will stretch around both of us." Like a child she obeyed. We were indeed reduced to saving the warmth of our bodies. I shipped my oars and took one for a paddle, bidding Madame de Ferrier to hold the covering in place while I felt for the shore. She did so, her arm crossing my breast, her soft body touching mine. She was cold and still as the cloud in which we moved; but I was a god, riding triumphantly high above the world, satisfied to float through celestial regions forever, bearing in my breast an unquenchable coal of fire. The moon played tricks, for now she was astern, and now straight ahead, in that confusing wilderness of vapor. "Madame," I said to my companion, "why have you been persuaded to go back to France?" She drew a deep breath. "I have not been persuaded. I have been forced by circumstances. Paul's future is everything." "You said you would rather make him a woodchopper than a suppliant to the Bonapartes." "I would. But his rights are to be considered first. He has some small chance of regaining his inheritance through the influence of Count de Chaumont now. Hereafter there may be no chance. You know the fortunes and lands of all emigres were forfeited to the state. Ours have finally reached the hands of one of Napoleon's officers. I do not know what will be done. I only know that Paul must never have cause to reproach me." I was obliged to do my duty in my place as she was doing her duty in hers; but I wished the boat would sink, and so end all journeys to France. It touched shore, on the contrary, and I grasped a rock which jutted toward us. It might be the point of an island, it might be the eastern land, as I was inclined to believe, for the moon was over our right shoulders. Probing along with the oar I found a cove and a shallow bottom, and there I beached our craft with a great shove. "How good the earth feels underfoot!" said Madame de Ferrier. We were both stiff. I drew the boats where they could not be floated away, and we turned our faces to the unknown. I took her unresisting arm to guide her, and she depended upon me. This day I look back at those young figures groping through cloud as at disembodied and blessed spirits. The man's intensest tenderness, restrained by his virginhood and his awe of the supple delicate shape at his side, was put forth only in her service. They walked against bushes. He broke a stick, and with it probed every yard of the ascent which they were obliged to make. Helping his companion from bush to log, from seam to seam of the riven slope, from ledge to ledge, he brought her to a level of high forest where the fog was thinner, and branches interlaced across their faces. The climb made Madame de Ferrier draw her breath quickly. She laughed when we ended it. Though I knew the shores as well as a hunter, it was impossible to recognize any landmark. The trees, the moss, and forest sponge under our feet, the very rocks, were changed by that weird medium. And when the fog opened and we walked as through an endless tunnel of gray revolving stone, it was into a world that never existed before and would never exist again. There was no path. Creeping under and climbing over obstacles, sometimes enclosed by the whiteness of steam, sometimes walking briskly across lighted spaces, we reached a gorge smoking as the lake smoked in the chill of early mornings. Vapor played all its freaks on that brink. The edge had been sharply defined. But the fog shut around us like a curtain, and we dared not stir. Below, a medallion shaped rift widened out, and showed us a scene as I have since beheld such things appear upon the stage. Within the round changing frame of wispy vapor two men sat by a fire of logs and branches. We could smell wood smoke, and hear the branches crackle, convincing us the vision was real. Behind them stood a cabin almost as rude as my shelter on the island. One man was a grand fellow, not at all of the common order, though he was more plainly clothed than De Chaumont. His face was so familiar that I almost grasped recognition--but missed it. The whole cast was full and aquiline, and the lobe of his ear, as I noticed when light fell on his profile, sat close to his head like mine. The other man worked his feet upon the treadle of a small wheel, which revolved like a circular table in front of him, and on this he deftly touched something which appeared to be an earthenware vessel. His thin fingers moved with spider swiftness, and shaped it with a kind of magic. He was a mad looking person, with an air of being tremendously driven by inner force. He wore mustaches the like of which I had never seen, carried back over his ears; and these hairy devices seemed to split his countenance in two crosswise. Some broken pottery lay on the ground, and a few vessels, colored and lustrous so they shone in the firelight, stood on a stump near him. The hollow was not a deep one, but if the men had been talking, their voices did not reach us until the curtain parted. "You are a great fool or a great rascal, or both, Bellenger," the superior man said. "Most people are, your highness," responded the one at the wheel. He kept it going, as if his earthenware was of more importance than the talk. "You are living a miserable life, roving about." "Many other Frenchmen are no better off than I am, my prince." "True enough. I've roved about myself." "Did you turn schoolmaster in Switzerland, prince?" "I did. My family are in Switzerland now." "Some of the nobles were pillaged by their peasants as well as by the government. But your house should not have lost everything." "You are mistaken about our losses. The Orleans Bourbons have little or no revenue left. Monsieur and Artois were the Bourbons able to maintain a court about them in exile. So you have to turn potter, to help support the idiot and yourself?" "Is your highness interested in art?" "What have I to do with art?" "But your highness can understand how an idea will haunt a man. It is true I live a wretched life, but I amuse myself trying to produce a perfect vase. I have broken thousands. If a shape answers my expectations, that very shape is certain to crack in the burning or run in the glaze." "Then you don't make things to sell?" "Oh, yes. I make noggins and crockery to sell in the towns. There is a kind of clay in these hills that suits me." "The wonderful vase," said the other yawning, "might perhaps interest me more if some facts were not pressing for discussion. I am a man of benevolent disposition, Bellenger." "Your royal highness--" "Stop! I have been a revolutionist, like my poor father, whose memory you were about to touch--and I forbid it. But I am a man whose will it is to do good. It is impossible I should search you out in America to harm my royal cousin. Now I want to know the truth about him." Madame de Ferrier had forgotten her breath. We both stood fastened on that scene in another world, guiltless of eavesdropping. The potter shifted his eyes from side to side, seeming to follow the burr of his vessel upon the wheel. "I find you with a creature I cannot recognize as my royal cousin. If this is he, sunk far lower than when he left France in your charge, why are two-thirds of his pension sent out from New York to another person, while you receive for his maintenance only one-third?" The potter bounded from his wheel, letting the vessel spin off to destruction, and danced, stretching his long mustaches abroad in both hands as the ancients must have rent their clothes. He cried that he had been cheated, stripped, starved. "I thought they were straitened in Monsieur's court," he raged, "and they have been maintaining a false dauphin!" "As I said, Bellenger," remarked his superior, "you are either a fool or the greatest rascal I ever saw." He looked at Bellenger attentively. "Yet why should you want to mix clues--and be rewarded with evident misery? And how could you lose him out of your hand and remain unconscious of it? He was sent to the ends of the earth for safety--poor shattered child!--and if he is safe elsewhere, why should you be pensioned to maintain another child? They say that a Bourbon never learns anything; but I protest that a Bourbon knows well what he does know. I feel sure my uncle intends no harm to the disabled heir. Who is guilty of this double dealing? I confess I don't understand it." Now whether by our long and silent stare we drew his regard, or chance cast his eye upward, the potter that instant saw us standing in the cloud above him. He dropped by his motionless wheel, all turned to clay himself. The eyeballs stuck from his face. He opened his mouth and screeched as if he had been started and could not leave off-- "The king!--the king!--the king!--the king!"