“I expect they know it already, but they probably don’t know that I can understand what they say when they are talking together. I am curious, as I told you, about the Waluguru. And I’m curious about Godovius too.”
Next day she put the boys to work upon a patch of sweet potatoes under the sisal hedge. In the evening when she came to M‘Crae she could see that he had heard something. For all his hard experience of life he was a very simple soul. Once or twice when she spoke to him he had to wait a second to remember the echo of her question, and she quickly saw that his mind would really rather have been thinking of something else. This was the only sign of his preoccupation. In every other way he was his solemn self, taking everything that she said with a seriousness which was sometimes embarrassing. She didn’t want always to be taken in such deadly earnest, and now it seemed to her almost as if he were taking advantage of this peculiarity to evade her. She wasn’t going to have that.
“You might just as well tell me first as last,” she said.
At this he was honestly surprised. “But how do you know I have anything to tell you?”
“You are so easy to understand,” she said.
He smiled and looked at her, wondering. It had never exactly struck him that a woman could understand him so completely. Of course he knew nothing about women, but for all that he had always been completely satisfied that there wasn’t much to know.
“You want me to tell you things that I’m not even sure of myself,” he said.
“All the more reason . . . for I might help you.”
He shook his head. “No. . . . I have to think it out myself, to piece a lot of things together: what I heard from the Masai: what I hear from you, the things I’ve heard the Waluguru talking about to-day. I can’t tell you until I’m satisfied myself . . .”
She said: “You think I’m simply curious . . .” and blushed.