"Oh, but I couldn’t—​I am so ashamed. First, it appears, I deprive you of your tent—​and now of your food."

"I assure you I have never used the tent in my life. I always prefer to sleep out in the open. As for the food, it makes no odds at all, please believe me."

"But your boy ran away when he could not find your box. You will have no supper!--You must share mine," she proffered shyly. He gave a surreptitious glance at the wafery slices of beef and tomatoes, then answered with alacrity:

"Not at all, not at all. I wasn’t going to have any supper anyway. I’m—​I’m not hungry."

He had in fact decided that this was no time to put on exhibition the wolf that raged within him. And his manners being persuasive as well as pretty, he eventually convinced the lady of his sincerity, and she sat down to finish her supper alone while he departed with the air of a man with a mission—​which was exactly what he was.

Straight as a homing pigeon he headed for the waggon of the wounded warriors. Most of them had already turned in, but the American surgeon, resting near the remains of a good meal, hailed him blithely:

"Hullo, Bet!"

"For the love of Michael Angelo give me a drink, and a wedge of bread and bully," said the hapless Bet. "And send your animal of a Makalika to search every waggon until he finds Mrs Stannard’s box of provisions. When found, deliver to me."

Later, his inner man replenished, he returned to McKinnon’s waggon with the air of a conqueror and the recovered box of provisions.

"Well! we’ve got it, Mrs Stannard!"

She looked up at him with such surprise that he wondered at first whether she had never expected to see it again. Then the truth occurred to him.

"I beg your pardon. But I was in Randal and Hallam’s the day you came in to do your shopping. You wouldn’t of course have noticed me," (the expectant pause he made here was almost imperceptible), "but I was impertinent enough to inquire your name."

"And you recognised me again?"

"There are some faces one never forgets," he said quietly, but effectively. Looking up into his eyes, she saw there something which she had seen in the eyes of men before that night; and which always roused in her a longing to rub their noses in the dust.

"Let us hope they are not all crowned with hats," she said laughingly. "Memory might be over-crowded."

He was delighted with her. To be witty as well as pretty! That made the game worth the heat and toil of the chase! Thus they stood, the rose-lights from the fires about them, the great crushed pearl above them; taking each other’s measure, marking down each other’s weaknesses, and each secretly registering a vow to the other’s undoing. But they parted with the pleasant conventional phrases under which both good and bad intentions are so subtly concealed.

She breakfasted within sight the next morning, but he did not go near her, being content after having exchanged a morning greeting, to sit under his tree and reflect upon the ten good days to come. She made a charming picture in her dark short skirt, white blouse, and the rather rakish Panama he remembered so well as a feature of their first encounter in Randal’s winkel. She had brightened up wonderfully since then, he thought. Perhaps the relief of leaving all her domestic troubles behind her had something to do with it, but certainly disillusion had done no harm to her complexion so far, nor worry spoiled the fine line of her cheek and chin. Her looks had an edge to them that appealed to the connoisseur in him. It was not so much that she was pretty, as that she had good lines and that her clear pallor, the tilt of her head, and her dainty walk, carried an air of race and insolence with them; both things that meant something to a man like Bettington who admired the quality of insolence in women almost more than anything-- probably because he knew how unworthy he was of anything but their insolent toleration.

Before the day’s trek began, there was a lot of gathering up and stowing away of belongings to be done, and it was natural that Bettington being on the spot should help Mrs Stannard.

Natural too that he should suggest a tramp ahead as per the example set by numerous other couples, all anxious to avoid the dust and monotony of the trek and get some exercise into the bargain. She tramped a little while with him, and he liked her long swinging walk, and found her mind as buoyant as her feet. When the boy who was perched on the brake of her waggon guarding little Aimee came running to report that the bebe was awake and crying, Bettington could have kicked him with the greatest blessing in the world. Moreover it occurred to him that babies were odious little beasts, and that no nice woman ought to saddle herself with such things.

But on later afternoons he blessed the pale and fretful Aimee, for without her as a chaperon he could not have sat hour after hour on the brake of Mrs Stannard’s waggon talking to her on every subject in the world but the one that filled his mind and was to be read plainly in his eyes by anyone who took the trouble to look deep enough.

Mrs Stannard was very careful to look neither deep nor long. Bettington came to the conclusion that she was a very clever woman, though he often wondered where she had got her experience. Marriage with Stannard might well have constituted an education, of a kind. But where had she learned that delightful way of assuming all the frank innocence of a young girl?--that lent such piquancy to the fact that she was really a married woman doing a bolt from her duties! And where achieved the subtle art of keeping a man with his toe to the chalk line, without wearing him out or allowing him to show his impatience for the starting bell? Bettington admired her almost to stupefaction for these things. At least it was to stupefaction he assigned the fact that he sometimes found himself sitting and gazing at her until the red crept in a little curly wave from her chin to the bronzy hair. Then indeed it was time to talk about literature, or make himself so useful and amusing to Aimee that Aimee’s mother would not have the heart to drive him away, under the pretext that she had a headache or that Aimee wanted to go to sleep.

She had beautiful eyes of an uncommon colour, rather like liquid amber, and as full of dots and dashes as a Marconi message, only far more interesting to read. So thought Bettington at least, and would have liked to spend a great deal of time in sorting out and classifying the natural shades and shadows in them from those brought flickering there by humour or melancholy or any other mood that seized her. When he found out one day by picking up a bracelet which belonged to her that she was called Amber, he rejoiced with his journalistic sense at the singular appropriateness of it, and that night found him lying under the waggon scribbling in his note-book a poem which began:

O amber heart, and amber eyes!

That the subject of it was sitting not far off in the gloaming shadows, hushing Aimee to sleep and looking rather like a gentle modern Madonna, lent the sting of secret and forbidden pleasure to his occupation. As Wilde says: "The simplest thing is a joy when it is secret!"

The one fly in the amber, so to speak, was Aimee. She was always on the spot, and as ubiquitous as only a baby less than a year old can be. True, Mrs Stannard commanded the services of a nurse-boy called September, but the latter was mostly busy with the pots and pans, and Aimee preferred the society of her mother or, failing that, of Bettington. Yes, much to his secret annoyance (and this secret was no joy) the little animal actually liked to sprawl over him, clutching at his moustache and poking her fingers in his ears and up his nose. Sometimes she howled for him to hush her to sleep, and once she refused to take her bottle unless he gave it to her! Another time she spilled her bottle all over his very spick and span breeches and gaiters, and upon that festival he could very willingly have killed and eaten her. Another and horrible occasion when he was lying peacefully on his rug under the waggon, with Amber Eyes sitting sewing on a water barrel near by, the baby crawled over to him, lolled upon him amorously and was sick amongst his hair! Amber released him from its clutches and he escaped to the river, but he hated to look back on that moment—​it was not one of those in which he could truthfully claim to have been the master of his fate and the captain of his soul!