She was standing beside him now, one hand toying absently with a button on his coat, a half-absent, half-serious expression in her large eyes that was very sweet. Her mind went back to the period to which he referred, when he was ill and fevered and fainting on the cloud-swept hill side. What a contrast! She saw him now, dominant, restored in every way, having ended the disturbance here in his own jurisdiction by sheer personal intrepidity and weight of influence—the calm, strong, cool-headed official, to whom all looked up.
“Tell me about Cynthia Daintree,” she said.
“Just the very thing I’ve wanted to do. By the way, incidentally, she has hooked that young ass, Beecher. Whether she’ll land him is another matter.”
“I know. I know, too, what you wanted to tell me that day we went to visit Sarbaland Khan. Well, we met with a very uncommon interruption then.”
“Hilda, Hilda. What a witch you are. Is there anything you don’t know?”
“Yes, plenty. But I won’t bother you to go over all that again, because I know it already. In fact, I knew it on that very day, though not through you. Remember the dak may bring me momentous communications as well as you. Oh, by the way, I have a little present here for you. Will you take it?”
“Will I? Will I value anything from you! Darling, how can you ask?”
She did not return his kiss. Her manner was constrained—almost awkward. Turning to the table she placed in his hands a document—large, parchmenty, legal-looking. Then she turned away.
“Why, what on earth is this?” he said as he read through it, and at length mastered how it set forth, amid infinite legal terminology, how shares and property and cash to the amount of thirty-seven thousand pounds was conveyed to “the said Herbert Raynier by his said cousin, the said Hilda Clive.”
“Great Scott! What does it all mean?”