The girl had been watching him closely as he stood silently thinking after her last words. She did not know the struggle that the calm face hid; yet she felt that the dragging moments were big with the question of her fate.
“Well?” she said at length.
“We must eat first,” he replied in a matter-of-fact tone, and not at all as though he was about to renounce his life’s happiness, “and then we shall set out in search of your father. I shall take you to him, Virginia, if man can find him.”
“I knew that you could,” she said, simply, “but how my father and I ever can repay you I do not know—do you?”
“Yes,” said Bulan, and there was a sudden rush of fire to his eyes that kept Virginia Maxon from urging a detailed explanation of just how she might repay him.
In truth she did not know whether to be angry, or frightened, or glad of the truth that she read there; or mortified that it had awakened in her a realization that possibly an analysis of her own interest in this young stranger might reveal more than she had imagined.
The constraint that suddenly fell upon them was relieved when Bulan motioned her to follow him back down the trail into the gorge in search of food. There they sat together upon a fallen tree beside a tiny rivulet, eating the fruit that the man gathered. Often their eyes met as they talked, but always the girl’s fell before the open worship of the man’s.
Many were the men who had looked in admiration at Virginia Maxon in the past, but never, she felt, with eyes so clean and brave and honest. There was no guile or evil in them, and because of it she wondered all the more that she could not face them.
“What a wonderful soul those eyes portray,” she thought, “and how perfectly they assure the safety of my life and honor while their owner is near me.”
And the man thought: “Would that I owned a soul that I might aspire to live always near her—always to protect her.”