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“And why not?”

“The waters are bad–bad–haunted!”

“I fear no ghosts. Wilt thou show me the way, Camille?”

“I!” The idiot fell upon the grass with a sort of gobbling cry. I thought it the prelude to a fit of some sort, and was stepping towards him, when he rose to his feet, waved me off and hurried away down the slope homewards.

Here was food for reflection, which I mumbled in secret.

A day or two afterwards I joined Camille at midday on the heights where he was pasturing his flocks. He had shifted his ground a little distance westwards, and I could not find him at once. At last I spied him, his back to a rock, his hand dabbled for coolness in a little runnel that trickled at his side. He looked up and greeted me with a smile. He had conceived an affection for me, this poor lost soul.

“It will go soon,” he said, referring to the miniature streamlet. “It is safe in the woods; but to-morrow or next day the sun will lap it up ere it can reach the skirt of the shadow above there. A farewell kiss to you, little stream!”

He bent and sipped a mouthful of the clear water. He was in a more reasonable state than he had shown for long, though it was now close on the moon’s final quarter, a period that should have marked a more general tenor of placidity in him. The summer solstice, was, however, at hand, and the weather sultry to a degree–as it had been, I did not fail to remember, the year of his seizure.

“Camille,” I said, “why to-day hast thou shifted thy ground a little in the direction of the Buet ravine?”

He sat up at once, with a curious, eager look in his face.

“Monsieur has asked it,” he said. “It was to impel Monsieur to ask it that I moved. Does Monsieur seek a guide?”

“Wilt thou lead me, Camille?”

“Monsieur, last night I dreamed and one came to me. Was it my father? I know not, I know not. But he put my forehead to his breast, and the evil left it, and I remembered without terror. ‘Reveal the secret to the stranger,’ he said; ‘that he may share thy burden and comfort thee; for he is strong where thou art weak, and the vision shall not scare him.’ Monsieur, wilt thou come?”

He leaped to his feet, and I to mine.

“Lead on, Camille. I follow.”

He called to the leader of his flock: “Petitjean! stray not, my little one. I shall be back sooner than the daisies close.” Then he turned to me again. I noticed a pallid, desperate look in his face, as though he were strung to great effort; but it was the face of a mindless one still.

“Do you not fear?” he said, in a whisper; and the apple in his throat seemed all choking core.

“I fear nothing,” I answered with a smile; yet the still sombreness of the woods found a little tremor in my breast.

“It is good,” he answered, regarding me. “The angel spoke truth. Follow, Monsieur.”

He went off through the trees of a sudden, and I had much ado to keep pace with him. He ran as one urged on by a sure sense of doom, looking neither to right nor left. His mountain instincts had remained with him when memory itself had closed around like a fog, leaving him face to face and isolated with his one unconfessed point of terror. Swiftly we made our way, ever slightly climbing, along the rugged hillside, and soon broke into country very wild and dismal. The pastoral character of the scene lessened and altogether disappeared. The trees grew matted and grotesquely gnarled, huddling together in menacing battalions–save where some plunging rock had burst like a shell, forcing a clearing and strewing the black moss with a jagged wreck of splinters. Here no flowers crept for warmth, no sentinel marmot turned his little scut with a whistle of alarm to vanish like a red shadow. All was melancholy and silence and the massed defiance of ever-impending ruin. Storm, and avalanche, and the bitter snap of frost had wrought their havoc year by year, till an uncrippled branch was a rare distinction. The very saplings, of stunted growth, bore the air of thieves reared in a rookery of crime.