“I scarcely ever feel alone, Desmond,” she said.
And, as she spoke, she cast a glance behind her into the darkness from which she had just come. Renfrew noticed it.
“You have been alone?” he asked hastily. Then he checked himself with an ashamed laugh.
“What a fool I am,” he exclaimed.
He clasped her more closely.
“A fool, because I'm so desperately in love with you, Claire,” he said, rushing on his confession with the swiftness of alarmed bravery. “Look here, I want to tell you something. You must put everything I do, everything I am, down to the account of my love,—shyness, anger, abruptness, violence,—everything, Claire. My love's responsible. It does play the devil with an ordinary man when he's given his very soul to—to a woman like you, to a great woman. It keeps him back when he ought to go on, and sends him on when he ought to stay quiet, and makes him jealous of stones and—and savages.”
“Savages, Desmond?”
Renfrew's face was scarlet. He put up his hand before it and muttered:—
“This fire's scorching. Yes, Claire, of savages. Didn't you find that out this afternoon, when we were in Tetuan? But of course you couldn't. You couldn't know you'd married such an infernal lunatic.”