They looked at each other with curiosity. Felix was not an engaging object, with the lower half of his gaunt face shrouded in stubbly black beard. He had discarded his collar and tie, and Comrade Dawkes had lent him a very dirty blue jersey. The girl had the soiled, rumpled aspect of one who has slept in her clothes. Her hair was rough and tumbling down, and full of bits of hay. There were purple marks under her eyes, and her lids were red with the unavailing tears of many days.
The friendliness of the young man's heart was curiously unmixed with any feeling of sex attraction. Sex only entered into the question in so far that he was more sorry for Rona than he would have been for a boy in her case, on account of her greater helplessness.
"I feel very queer," said Rona, shyly, "and terribly stiff."
"I daren't let you get up and move about yet," he returned. "It is so cold, the wind cuts like a knife. I'll go and make you some hot tea. Could you eat some bacon?"
She said "No" to that, with an expression of loathing. He went to the cabin, and with infinite labor managed to make a bit of toast, which he took to her, fervently hoping that it did not taste of paraffin. She earnestly asserted that it did not, but could not eat it nevertheless. She drank the tea, however, and declared herself refreshed. But Felix could see that she felt very ill. He could not stay long with her, for he had to wash up, make the so-called bed, put the cabin tidy, etc.; all the time parrying with difficulty the intense interest and pointed questions of the steersman of the barge ahead.
When he next went to her, she wished to know where they were going. He told her Basingstoke, and that from thence they would have to tramp to Sempleton, where the Convent was situated. She was glad she had not to walk that day. She was sure she should be better to-morrow, if she lay quite still. She was warm, and not very uncomfortable.
They reached Teddington Lock at midday, and below it they waited forty-five minutes by Mr. Doggett's watch; which delay provoked a cataract of comment which left the listener stunned. At this place Felix bought a paper, which, to his relief, said nothing of any abduction or elopement, nor made any comment upon the disappearance of two such obscure persons as themselves. He cheered Rona with this news. Here he also persuaded the lock-keeper's wife to sell him a fresh egg for the sum of one halfpenny, since "his sister" was ill, and found herself quite unable to eat the pork chops which were, with fried greens, to form the midday repast of himself and Mr. Doggett.
His cooking gave his new master great satisfaction. Mr. Doggett consumed his succulent repast in full view of the envious crew of the George Barnes, who had some cold meat of the least appetizing description, and to whom the savory odor from the cabin of the Sarah Dawkes was a provocation hard to be endured.
The lock-keeper's wife, charmed by Felix's persuasive tongue, herself toasted bread for Rona, who, stimulated by the fresh air and the rest cure she was undergoing, managed to eat both egg and toast, to the relief and triumph of the young man, whose only interest in life she had suddenly become.
He developed powers of ready invention, coupled with artistic restraint, in informing the crew of the George Barnes, in answer to their vast and avid desire for personal information, how his sister had worked in a pickle factory, and how the air was so bad that she had been attacked with anæmia, and how the doctors recommended a trip up the canal as the finest cure for this same dread complaint. The man had never heard of anæmia, and treated it with the awe-struck respect entertained by the scolding lady of Theodore Hook's story, for a parallelogram.