Ah, she had come down now from her judgment seat. She was the pleader now. Adrian, whose sombre eyes had never left her face throughout this appeal, was conscious of the wave of a new hope surging through his being.
“You only want to save his life? Never to see or speak with him again?” he repeated.
“Yes—yet no. I must just see him to satisfy myself that he is really alive and safe—but not to speak to him.”
For fully a minute they stood there gazing into each other’s face in the dull light of the tent lantern. Then Adrian said:
“You are right, Aletta. I can help you. I can save his life. But”—and his words were slow and deliberate, and full of meaning—“if I do what is to be my reward?”
She understood, but she did not flinch.
“If you do—if you save his life, if you let him escape, I will marry you, Adrian! That is what you wish, I suppose?”
“Great God, it is!” he answered fervently, his dark face flushing with intense joy. “You will soon forget this Englishman, my darling—you, whom I have loved ever since we were children. But—swear that you will keep this compact, Aletta.”
“I swear it,” she answered, hardly recognising her own voice.
“I will keep my side. I will show you this Englishman alive and free, and then you will marry me?”