"Well, if you won't get up and lunch," he said aloud, "you'd best have a sleeping draught and try to go to sleep."
But Sybil did not want to be put to sleep, she wanted to lie and shiver and look ill and complain and talk about herself. So the doctor put the draught back in his pocket and went off to the dining tent, where he found St John, and the two men sat down to luncheon alone.
CHAPTER X THE REACTION
That same evening, late, when the moon was pouring silver over the encampment and over the level plain, and the pink and orange ridges of rocky hills that lay to the west and east, and the air was cool and still, Everest and Sybil sat in the latter's tent, of which the flap was securely shut and tied. They were alone. The girl was dressed now, and sitting on a folding-chair. She looked pale, and her face was tense with anxiety, her eyes distracted.
Everest sat opposite her, restored by his long sleep, calm and entirely composed. On his face was an unusual expression of severity: it looked implacable, absolutely immovable, like a countenance of stone. Sybil clasped her hands and wrung them together in her lap.
"Oh, Everest, don't say such things," she said, in a low tone. "Don't say you won't marry me—any time. Not just now, I know you can't—not for some time, perhaps, but promise you will some time—when we are back in Europe, say. It is so dreadful to me to think of—of—all that has happened, if we are not to marry after all."
"Why did you seek such a position, then?" he asked, looking across at her steadily; and she, meeting the gaze of those large eyes full of fiery darkness like the African sky at midnight, felt her soul sink and faint in a mingled anguish of shame and despair and hopeless longing for him.
"You knew that I was with a woman I loved, and who loved me. Why did you come and try to force yourself, as you did from the first, between us?"