"He had not always two faces," she said in her heart. "Something hurt him badly once, and ever since he has taken refuge behind the iron mask."
"Rhodesia," her heart whispered, almost without her consciousness, "cannot you with your fairness reward him for his work by soothing away the memory so that the refuge is no longer needed?..."
A little later, as they all prepared to ride home, she saw how resolutely he took his place with the engineer, and hastened on ahead, quenching even Diana by the stoniness of his mien.
XIII
A DECISION THAT FAILED
As Carew sat outside his hut that evening smoking a solitary pipe, two thoughts seemed to fill his mind. The one that he had told Meryl he would be pleased to visit the temple ruins with her; the other the warning unconsciously conveyed in Diana's raillery, reminding him that he was in danger of straying from the rigid pathway he had chosen of unsociable aloofness, and therefore in a measure, perchance, inviting trouble.
But of course he need not go. A polite message by Stanley, or a call as he rode past perhaps, already starting on some convenient engagement. Yet as he sat on he knew it was not entirely his wish to resort to either subterfuge. Why, after all, should he not go with her just once, and no doubt Diana also, and tell them a little about the mysterious walls?
He pulled hard at his pipe, staring into the darkness. Why not go and get it over, instead of troubling to send an excuse? Surely that were the simpler plan? One moment he thought he would, and the next he found himself shrinking unaccountably, warned again by Diana's chaff. He knew quite well she was right. He was a man, or a bear if she preferred it, with two faces; but the trouble was that she should so thoroughly have grasped the fact. He had only intended to show one face, the uninviting, frigid one; and yet unconsciously she had won from him more than one glimpse of the other.
And if he unbent so far as to act as their escort to the ruins, he was yielding still further to an atmosphere of friendliness he had forsworn.