Here they were! He felt now her loneliness, her sadness, her—the word rose—her helpless dependence upon himself. She was so helpless! His heart throbbed with feeling. He couldn't look down at her, standing there so close. He couldn't have spoken; not just then. He was struggling with the impractical thought that he might yet protect her from the savage tongues of the coast; from himself, even, when you came to it. The depression that had been pulling him down all day was turning now, rushing up and flooding his fired brain like a bitter tide. He shouldn't have let her come. It had been a beautiful impulse; her quiet determination to give her life into his hands had thrilled him beyond his deepest dreams of happiness, had lifted him to a plane of devotion that he remembered now, felt again, even in his bitterness, as utter beauty, intensified rather than darkened by the tragic quality of the hour. But he shouldn't have let her come. Mightn't she, after all, have been as safe hack there in the mission compound? What was the matter?... He hadn't thought of her coming on with him alone. That had simply happened. It was bewildering. Life had swept them out of commonplace safety, and now here they were! And nothing to do but go on, go through!
“Oh, I left my bag in there,” he heard her saying, and himself got it quickly from the litter.
Then John came. The “number one” rooms were to be theirs, it seemed; Betty's and his.... If only he could talk to her! She needed him so ! Never, perhaps, again, would she need him as now, and he, it seemed, was failing her. Silently he led her up the steps of the little building at the end of the courtyard and into the corridor; peered into one dim room and then into the other; then curtly, roughly ordered John to spread for her his own square of new matting.
Her hand was still on his arm, resting there, oh, so lightly. She seemed very slim and small.
“It's a dreadful place,” he made himself say. “But we'll have to make the best of it.”
“I don't mind,” he thought she replied.
“Perhaps we'd better have dinner in here, It's a little cleaner than my room.”
She glanced up at him, then down: “I don't believe I can eat anything.”
“But you must.”
“I—I'll try.”