"Yes," he said gently, and there was a tender note in his voice. "I will keep my word. You shall not fall into their hands. I promise you that."
She sighed faintly, and made room for him beside her on the rough seat.
"That is settled, then. And now, just for this last half-hour, let us pretend that we are in no danger, that we are waiting for our friends, the friends we ran away from at the picnic—yesterday."
Something in her own words startled her, and she broke off abruptly.
"Well?" He smiled at her. "Let us pretend. How shall we begin?"
"Was it only yesterday?" Her accent thrilled him through and through. "Did we really start out from my uncle's bungalow yesterday morning? How gay we were, weren't we—all the twenty of us ... you and I leading because our horses were the best and I knew the way...."
"Yes—and all the smart young officers looking daggers at me because I had carried you off!" His tone was admirably light.
"Nonsense!" Hilda Ryder actually laughed, and in the dim and gloomy hut her laughter sounded almost uncanny. "I'm sure no one was in the least envious! You see, we were new friends—and it is such a treat to meet someone new out here!"
"Yes. By Jove, we'd only met twice, hadn't we? Somehow I was thinking we were quite old friends, you and I! But as you say, I was a new-comer, this was my first visit to the East. Rather a change, India and the snows, from a slum in Shoreditch!"
"Shoreditch? Did you really live in a slum?"