She crept to him shivering, thankful for the shielding arm he threw around her.
"The sunrise can't be far off," he said. "I expect you are hungry, aren't you?"
She was very hungry, and he put a biscuit into her hand. The very fact of eating there in the darkness in some measure reassured her. She ate several biscuits, and began to feel much better.
"Getting warmer?" questioned Nick. "Let me feel your hands." They were still cold, and he took them and thrust them down against his breast. She shrank a little at the touch of his warm flesh.
"It will make you so cold," she murmured.
But he only laughed at her softly, and pressed them closer. "I am not easily chilled," he said. "Besides, it's sleeping that makes you cold. And I haven't slept."
Muriel heard the news with astonishment. She was no longer angry with Nick, and her fears of him were dormant. Though she would never forget and might never forgive his treachery, he was her sole protector in that wilderness of many terrors, and she lacked the resolution to keep him at arm's length. There was, moreover, something comforting in his presence, something that vastly reassured her, making her lean upon him almost in spite of herself.
"Haven't you slept at all?" she asked him in wonder. "How in the world did you keep awake?"
He did not answer her, only laughed again as though at some secret joke. He seemed to be in rather good spirits, she noticed, and she marvelled at him with a heavy pain at her heart that was utterly beyond expression or relief.
She sat silent for a little, then at length withdrew her hands, assuring him that they were quite warm.