This was tantamount to an appeal and she anticipated and hoped that the stranger would immediately offer her the refuge of his camp. To her mortification, he merely looked reflective.
“I see,” he said; then casually to Roper: “Well, you needn’t worry about me. I shall not encroach upon your provisions.”
“Very glad to hear it,” commented Roper, brusquely. “As for you, young fellah,” he turned his dark glance on Vivienne, “I don’t see what you’ve got to complain of. You have always had civil treatment from me and the best of whatever was going. Fine gratitude to turn on me now!”
The girl was silent for a moment, nonplussed by the stranger’s indifference, and the thought that perhaps after all his presence there was only an accident, that he did not mean to help her, and would go off to-morrow without a word, leaving her once more in the power of Roper! She determined that at any rate he should not be in any doubt as to her position.
“I’m not complaining without cause,” she said, looking at Roper scornfully; “you have repeatedly spoken most insultingly about being obliged to give me hospitality, and to-night your manner was so offensive that I was very glad to see this gentleman come into camp.”
“Ach! you’re a fool to get scared at my jokes. I’ve even forgotten what it was we were talking about. Whatever it was, I should have thought a big strapping fellow like you could have taken his own part.”
He laughed blusteringly, and she realised that he did not suspect the other man knew of her identity, and that he meant to keep up the fiction she herself had begun. Doubtless, he, too, expected the stranger to be gone with the dawn before he could make any further discoveries!
It seemed at any rate that there was nothing further to be done for the moment, or until she could be sure of the man whose name she did not even know, or whether he knew hers! After all, had he recognised her? Had she been mistaken in the meaning of that swift look given her when their eyes first met, that seemed to say: “All’s well! I am your friend!”
Surely he must remember her! Yet what had she done to be remembered by? Nothing. She had held herself aloof in disdainful pride from him as from all the others. She knew now that she had always felt an interest in this silent light-eyed man, who never seemed to look at anything but the horizon, and had felt more instinctively akin to him than the others. Still, she had never given any outward sign that he was not, as Laurence Hope has it, “less than the dust beneath her chariot wheels,” and had treated him to the same civil disdain with which she froze the other passengers. Oh! would he remember it against her now?—if he remembered her at all!
Her eyes searched his face almost pleadingly; but it told nothing. He had crossed his legs easily, and with one hand nursing his elbow, the other holding his pipe, sat smoking in impenetrable reflection.