Zelph placed a sheet of corn bread on the shelf of timbers from which Ellen had lately risen, set out birch-bark plates and maple forks, and served us with hornpout whose sweet and juicy flesh would have made the tenderest trout taste coarse. It was the first good meal I had eaten since that day, far back down the corridors of time, when the lot of us, innocent as a herd of sheep going to the slaughter, had first arrived in St. John’s to have our little fling at the glory and splendor of war. And when I glanced at Ellen, sitting small and straight beside me and staring out of round brown eyes at the wreck of my tow-cloth jacket: when I sniffed the sweet, warm scent that came slipping down from the pine forests on the heights at our backs: when I looked across the glassy narrows before us to the swelling blue hills of the New Hampshire Grants, I was conscious of a feeling of contentment such as I had never known.

It was Ellen, singularly enough, who disturbed my composure, though not unpleasantly. In a grave manner she asked me an unexpected question. “When I said that we were told to pretend to be betrothed, your poor brother Nathaniel and I, it seemed to me I saw a change in you. A small change, like that.” She measured off, with her thumb, a portion of a pink finger. “You might have been displeased, I thought, if we had been actually betrothed.” It was a statement, and yet a question.

“In a way,” I said lamely. “In a way, because this is no time for Nathaniel to think of marriage.”

“You thought I was not a fit person, perhaps? You think I wouldn’t make a good wife for your brother!”

“No, no! It wasn’t that! Not that at all! No, no, no!”

Ellen took her ball of wool from under her arm to free a strand. “I have heard so. I’ve heard the Bostonnais think, always, that each one of us who has learned her lessons in a convent is decorated with horns, like a little Mefistofele. Such a thought would be without foundation. Look!” She placed her hand on my upper arm and turned me toward her, bending her head forward so that her cap of glistening brown curls was close—so close I might have touched them with my lips. A faint fragrance rose from them. I could have said nothing coherent—unless, perhaps, my life had depended on it.