"You did not arrange your pedigree any more than I did mine. If you hadn't told me, I should never have guessed you weren't a full-blooded European. And after all, what does it matter?"
"There speaks the man who has only been out on the Coast six months."
"Six months or six years," said Carter stoutly, "makes no difference so far as I am concerned. We're neighbors, it appears, and I hope you will let me be one of your friends. Miss Slade, will you take compassion on a very lonely man and let him come over to Smooth River occasionally and see you? I can't tell you how ghastly the loneliness has been with only the Krooboys and Mr.—er—Swizzle-Stick Smith to talk to, though perhaps you can guess at it by the way I've let my outward man run to seed."
She gave him her slim brown hand. "I take frankly what you offer," she said. "If you let me become your friend, I shall count myself fortunate; you see, after what you have done for me to-day we can hardly start from the ordinary basis."
From there onwards their talk flowed easily. She had come over on a business errand for her father, and Carter settled that quickly and promptly. She went presently into the factory to rest after her long hammock ride, and Carter seized upon the chance to dive into his own room. Therefrom he emerged an hour later with a chin half-raw from recent shaving with a rusty razor, and wearing creased white drill clothes and a linen collar that sawed his neck abominably.
"I've arranged," he said, when next he saw her, "that you and I dine tête-à-tête, if you don't mind, down under those palm trees yonder. The mosquitos don't trouble down there just at sunset, and my boy, White-Man's-Trouble, only tastes things when they're going back to the cook house. It's mere prejudice to say he's had his filthy paw in every dish before it comes to me. Oh, by the way, Mr. Smith and his Majesty of Okky ask you to excuse them, as they have still more business to discuss before they can break up their meeting."
She laughed and understood him to a nicety. They slipped off into light easy talk as though they had known one another all their lives, and there was neither that narrow escape from tragedy behind them, nor Africa and possible tragedy ahead. The girl was good comrade. The man was hardly that. He too frankly devoured her with his eyes. And certainly, in her cool, frilled muslin dress, and her big green sun hat she was pretty enough to paint. Her hair was black assuredly, but her pale olive face was moulded in curves of the most delicious. In England, and as an Englishwoman, she would have been dark perhaps, though not noticeably so. Nine hundred and ninety-nine English people out of the thousand would have commented on her beauty only. In America—well, in America, she would at once have been placed in that class apart.
But Carter, the recently imported Englishman, saw nothing save only her beauty and her charm, and he behaved towards her as the English gentleman behaves towards his equal. A man who had been longer in Africa would have had the wisdom of one who had lived in the Southern States, and have picked out the African blood at a glance, and, as is the way of men who have eaten of the tree of that wisdom, would have ordered his civilities accordingly.