“Bompard,” replied the other, “Mon Dieu! How do I know? No, I have not seen him, he is big enough to take care of himself.”
“That may be,” she replied, “but accidents happen no matter how big a man may be. He has not returned—”
“So it would seem,” said La Touche, who had now got the tin open and was turning the contents on to a plate. “But he will return when he remembers that it is dinner-time.”
Her lips were dry with anger, there was a contained insolence in the manner and voice of the other that roused her as much as his callousness. His mind seemed as cold as his pale blue eyes. All her mixed feelings towards him focussed suddenly into a point—she loathed him; but she held herself in.
“If he has not returned when we have finished dinner,” said she, “we will have to look for him.” She took a plate and some of the beef he had turned from the tin and with a couple of biscuits drew off and taking her place outside in the sun began her wretched meal. A rabbit that had run out on the sands sat up and looked at her as she ate, then it ran off and as she followed it with her eyes she contrasted the little friendly form with the form of La Touche, the dark innocent eyes with those eyes of washed-out blue, without depth, or, perhaps, veiling depth.
When she had finished eating she put the plate by her side and sat waiting for La Touche to make a movement.
Bompard that morning had left his tinder box behind him in the cave, she heard the strike of flint on steel. La Touche was lighting his pipe. She waited ten minutes or more, then she came to the cave mouth.
“Are you not coming to look for Bompard?” asked she.
“I’ll go when I choose,” said he, “I don’t want orders.”
“I gave you no orders,” she replied, “I asked you, are you not coming to look for Bompard who may be in difficulties, or lying perhaps with a broken limb—and you sit there smoking your pipe. But I give you orders now; get up and come and help to look for him. Get up at once.”