“No,” she smiled, “you did it quite gracefully; and there was nobody about; they were all at dinner.”
“Who brought me up here?” he asked.
“I and the two native servants,” she laughed, and her laughter was pleasant to hear. “Are you in the habit of fainting?”
“I’ve never fainted before in my life,” said Jim, warmly, “until I had this go of cholera.”
“Cholera?” she ejaculated. “You’ve had cholera? How long ago?”
“Oh, I’m not infectious,” he smiled. “It was quite a while ago.” He gave her the facts with weary brevity: it was a picture that he wished to banish from the gallery of his memory.
“But, my dear friend,” she said, “when you’ve just come out of the jaws of death like that, you must take things easy. You ought to be in bed, toying with a spoonful of jelly and a grape. What’s your name?”
“Jim,” he answered. “What’s yours?”
“That is of no consequence,” she replied, smiling at him, as he thought to himself, like a heathen idol.
He was silent for a few moments. He was not quite sure whether it would not now be as well to kill Mr. Easton and resuscitate Mr. Tundering-West, for at the moment he was anxious to forget entirely his Bedouin life and his exile at the mines, and he was no longer a disreputable beggar.