The man, watching, saw that thinning of the lips, the hardening of all the young lines of her face. He knew he had blundered. Talk was cheap. It was action that counted in Lost Valley.
With a quick motion he reached over and caught the girl’s hand and drew it to him, covering it with both of his.
Her eyes followed, came to rest on his face, cool, appraising, waiting.
She was, in all that had counted in his life, crude, untutored, basic.
Yet that calm look made his impulsive action 177 seem unpardonable in the next second. However a warm surge of feeling shot through him with the quiet resting of that firm brown hand between his own, and he held it tighter. Kenset had thought he was sophisticated, that little or nothing could stir him deeply––not since Ethel Van Riper had gone to Europe as the bride of the old Count of Easthaven. That had been four years back. He had been pretty young then, but the young feel deeply.
Now he held a gun woman’s hand in the thin shade of a willow clump in the heart of Lost Valley––and the blood surged in his ears, the levels and slopes danced before his vision.
“Miss Tharon,” he said, for the first time using her given name, “I beg your pardon. You are strong, simple, serene. You know your land and its ways. I am an alien, an interloper––but I can’t bear to think of you as waiting for the time to kill a man––or to be killed in the killing. It sickens me.”
Tharon snatched her hand from his and leaped to her feet.
“Don’t talk like that!” she cried passionately, “I don’t like to hear it! I thought you were a real man, maybe, but you’re not! You––you’re a woman! A soft woman––I hate th’ breed!”
Her face was flushed, for what reason Kenset, 178 stunned by her vehement words, could not tell. She flung the rein up and followed it, leaping to saddle like a man.