"Whero, you are starving!" exclaimed Edwin, putting the remainder of his supper into the dusky, skinny fingers smoothing Beauty's mane.
"A man must learn to starve," retorted Whero. "The mother here will give me food when I come of nights and talk to Ottley."
"But your own mother, Whero, and Ronga, and the children, how do they live?" Edwin held back from asking after Nga-Hepé, "for," he said, as he looked at Whero, "he must be dead."
"How do they live?" repeated Whero, with a laugh. "Is the door of the whare ever shut against the hungry? They go to the pah daily, but I will not go. I will not eat with the men who struck down my father in his pride. I wander through the bush. Let him eat the food they bring him—he knows not yet how it comes; but his eyes are opening to the world again. When he sees me hunger-bitten, and my sister Rewi fat as ever, he will want the reason why. I will not give it. His strength is gone if he starves as I starve. How can it return? No; I will go to school to-morrow before he asks me."
Edwin's hand grasped Whero's with a warmth of sympathy that was only held in check by the dread of another nasal caress, and he exclaimed, "Come along, old fellow, and have a look at your grandfather too."
There was something about the grand old Maori's face which made Edwin feel that he both could and would extricate his unfortunate daughter from her painful position.
"It is a fix," Edwin went on; "but he has come to pull you through, I feel sure."
Still Whero held back. He did not believe it was his grandfather. He would not come without a following; and more than that, the proud boy could not stoop to show himself to a stranger of his own race in such a miserable guise. He coiled himself round in the straw and refused to stir.
"Now, Whero," Edwin remonstrated, "I call this really foolish; and if I were you I would not, I could not do it, speak of my own mother as one of the women. I like your mother. It rubs me up to hear you—" The boy stopped short; the measured breathing of his companion struck on his ear. Whero had already fallen fast asleep by Beauty's side.
"Oh, bother!" thought Edwin. "Yet, poor fellow, I won't wake you up, but I'll go and tell your grandfather you are here."