There was a faint ring of irony in the last two words, and excepting Jack, who was too angry to see anything, it was evident to the others that Mary had returned just a little better than she got. Linda evidently felt so, for naked malice peeped out of her next speech.
"We would be so glad to teach you, wouldn't we, Kate? And it would be so useful for you to know!"
Mrs. Worsley bent over her work, blushing for her young friend.
Mary continued to look at Linda steadily, and it was finally Linda's eyes that were obliged to stray away. "Thank you," said Mary, "but we will be expected at home in a few days."
"Oh, sorry," said Linda casually. She nodded at Mary, and smiled the inattentive smile that women mean to stab with. "Kate, do show me this next stitch," she said, affecting a sudden absorption in her work.
Mrs. Worsley ignored the question. Her face was now almost as red as Jack's. What passed between these two ladies when they presently found themselves alone may be guessed.
Jack, Mary, and Davy crossed the little square. There was a commotion going on inside Jack that he could not in the least analyze. He was furiously angry, but his sidelong glances at Mary dashed his anger, and made him fall to wondering if he had rightly understood what had happened. For Mary, instead of being humiliated and indignant as one might suppose, was actually smiling. She carried her head high, and the shine of triumph was in her eye. What was a man to make of this? Jack could only long in vain for a head to knock about.
The explanation was simple. "How silly I was to be so afraid of her," Mary was thinking. "To give herself away like that! She's a poor thing! I'm a better woman than she, and she knows it now. She can be jealous of me after this." Behind these thoughts another peeped like an elf through a leafy screen, but since the maiden herself refused to see it in its hiding-place it is not fair to discover it to the world.
Mary refused to refer in any way to what had happened, and Jack was therefore tongue-tied. All he could do was to show his sympathy in the ardour of his muscular efforts on her behalf. He put up their two tents, and stowed their baggage; he cut a wholly unnecessary amount of balsam for Mary's bed, and chopped and carried wood for their fire, until she stopped him. All this was observable to Linda watching from afar under her lashes, and in the meantime Kate was not sparing her.
Jack forgot all about Sir Bryson's order until a peremptory message recalled it. After he had embarked the governor, Baldwin Ferrie, and three Indians in the dugout, he swung an axe over his shoulder, and set off up the trail to chop down a tree or two, and "think things out," as he would have said. The operations of the human consciousness that go under the name of thinking differ widely in the individual. Meanwhile it should be mentioned that Jean Paul and Garrod had started on horseback with the object of finding a camp of Sapi Indians that was said to be not far away. They were gone all day. Jack hardly thought of them.