After a pause, while they both trudge on in hushed emotion—
“Poor old fellow! if he knew how much I understood what it must be to him to see me there, who am the embodiment of everything that he despises and dislikes, eating my luncheon, well and fit, while Bill is lying in his wretched makeshift of a South African grave, he would perhaps hate me a little less than he does.”
The girl turns to him now impulsively, her fine lucid eyes shining wetly in the semi-darkness.
“And if he could but look into your heart—oh, why haven’t we windows in our breasts? how much fewer mistakes there would be if we had!—he would see how gladly, gladly you would change places with Bill!”
The appeal is not answered. Campion’s head is sunk on his breast.
“You would, wouldn’t you?” she cries urgently, as if she could not bear a moment’s delay in the assent to a proposition so obvious.
There is an instant’s pause; then her companion—they have both stopped—lifts his eyes with obvious difficulty to hers.
“No,” he says, in a low but not uncertain voice, while the moon, which has just looked over a clump of neighbouring hornbeams, lights the sincerity of his quivering face, “I would not rather change places with Bill. I would rather be alive here, walking with you, than lying cold and bloody under that hideous veldt. I have never had any opinion of what is conventionally called honour. ‘Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday.’ Well, I have no wish to have died o’ Wednesday.”
For a moment a look of terror and aversion crosses Lavinia’s face; then her brow grows clear.
“It is lucky for you that I do not believe you,” she says, with a sort of laugh—“that I know your ways.”