'Now?' she echoed in her turn, still lost in her surprise.
'To-night I mean. Of course I have no chance of a tonga, so I must go by dhooli. It is a bore, but it can't be helped.'
The phrase seemed to bolster up his manliness, and he smiled at her. Such a pleasant-faced boy! so clean, so wholesome, so full of promise for the future. A pang shot through Gwen's heart at the sight of him and roused quick opposition to unlucky chance.
'But why? It isn't as if you were keeping him--I mean Mr. Fitzgerald. We settled all that; he goes back to Rajpore all the same.'
'So Gordon told me this afternoon. That is why I must return--the place can't be left alone, of course.' As he stood leaning against the mantelpiece his eye caught his own sketch, and he took it up half mechanically. 'To think I shall be back in that hole the day after to-morrow,' he said with a short laugh. He felt very sore, yet determined to face his pain in dignified fashion. 'Meanwhile,' he added, 'you must not be late. Is that your cloak?'
The futility of being tactful, even for your most familiar friends, was being borne in upon Gwen Boynton with the remembrance of her own certainty that Dan Fitzgerald's return to Rajpore must be necessary to the lad's acceptance of the leave. And here he was declaring it to be the stumbling-block! The thought sapped the very foundation of her general security, and made the results which this change in his plans might produce in hers strike her confusedly. She set aside the wrap he held out, with quite a tremulous hand.
'You are very foolish. Nobody wants you to go. Even Dan----'
'Perhaps,' he interrupted, feeling set up, as it were, by her evident regret. 'But, if anything were to go wrong, you know, I should never forgive myself.'
The words were to a certain extent quite meaningless to him; he did not even seriously contemplate the possibility they suggested and yet they roused her fears, her regrets.
'But if anything were to go wrong,' she answered, forgetting caution in her eagerness, 'it would be better you should be away. Surely you must see that it would be better for you both to be away--if--if anything should happen.'