"I am taking you back, Damaris my little love." He spoke slowly, with his eyes on the burning tents, the significance of which had sunk deep into his heart. "Won't you look up? Won't you just say that you will marry me, so that I can tell everyone directly we get back?"
He put her on her feet when she suddenly struggled and pushed against him, and stared aghast when she bowed her face in her hands and sobbed.
"Damaris—dear—what is it? Don't you want to marry me?"
Damaris nodded, her lovely head which glistened like a hall of silk in the blaze of the sun.
"You do? You will?—Then what are you crying for? Oh! Damaris———"
The words came muffled as she shook with sobs.
"Because of the scandal, Ben. Because of what people will say about me—I mean about me when they know I am engaged to—to you—they will—laugh at you behind your back—they will—they will know about—about——"
He pulled her to him quite roughly and pressed her head against his shoulder, which it barely reached.
"Laugh!" he said. "Laugh—at me—or you! I should just like to hear them, darling. There is a way out of all this, sweetheart, somewhere, and I am going to find it, and all that has happened, beloved, rests on my shoulders, and heaven knows they are broad enough to bear it. And if we have hurt others, darling,"—and he looked over his shoulder to the tents,—"it has been through my carelessness, and we shall be shown a way in which to try and make amends. Laugh, dear? Let them laugh, dear heart, when they see how we love each other."
But, for all that, he frowned above her curly head, because he had all the Englishman's horror of scandal in connection with any of his women-folk; but he set his teeth and crushed her up closer, then let her go suddenly and swung her round, pointing across to the west.