“Do you think you did? Because I look like my sister, and borrow her Panama, and wear her bangle, are those any reasons why you should take me for a married woman—and a disloyal one at that?”
Bettington had to take his medicine like a man. The best he could do was to mutter with a pious eye that he “thanked God she was not.”
“I thank God too,” she said inflexibly. But a little later she added more kindly:
“Perhaps we both rather meanly took advantage of private information.”
“I don’t know what inexpiable things you could have heard about me?” he asked reproachfully, secure in a sense of self-righteousness.
“When I persuaded my sister to let me go at the last moment instead of herself, Mr Randal gave me a brief résumé of your character and career. No doubt he thought it might interest me to know something of the man whose waggon I was to share.”
Ah! He almost wished he had time to go back to Umtali for a few days. Yet he really could not feel very mad with Randal or anyone else. Life looked so beguilingly fair all at once. His heart was light as a cork, but he pitched his voice to a becomingly humble key.
“Don’t you think we might begin again from quite a new basis?” he asked, looking at her with all the arrogance gone out of his eyes. “Without remembering any secret information or old scores?”
She considered a little while with downcast eyes, and a faint flush in her cheek. At last: “All right,” she said softly. Then added reflectively: “Aimée will want a lot of looking after on the voyage.”
But Bettington’s spirit was not quite broken.