The smiling ease with which Rawley stepped forth when I called his name with the others next morning might have disarmed me had I not caught a look of understanding between him and Mr. Vancouver, and known what it meant. My dread had been on Annabel’s account, but she did not appear.
Rawley worked faithfully in the fields that day, but I saw the furtive way in which he talked now and then with certain of the men, and I noted all whom he thus favored. None of them had a guilty manner, though a concealing one. It was evidence of Mr. Vancouver’s shrewdness in plotting.
Annabel met Christopher outside the camp that afternoon and came with him to Beelo and me. The boy betrayed a singular uneasiness as they approached, and, drawing his hat down, stood in awkward embarrassment. It puzzled me, for he had been anxious to see her. In a glow of excitement, Annabel was conspicuously handsome, and though dressed in the rougher of the two suits which she had saved from the wreck, showed in every line the thoroughbred that she was. Seeing the lad’s confusion, she spared him by giving him hardly more than a smiling glance with her warm hand-clasp, and breezily said to me as she held out an exquisite orchid:
“See what I found on the way. Isn’t it beautiful!” I took it and was fumbling to put it in the buttonhole of my lapel, when she stepped up and with frank comradeship adjusted it, remarking as she did so:
“He’s very much like his sister, but smaller, and not so pretty and graceful.” She did not realize that he understood English.
“I thank you—for Lentala,” he constrainedly said, staring at her as his eyes began to burn.
“Oh!” cried Annabel in amused surprise. “But you are quite too good-looking for a boy, Beelo!”
He did not smile, but studied her with a disconcerting seriousness, and looked from her to me, as though watching for something which I guessed to be a sly understanding between Annabel and me that might mean ridicule of him. I saw that Annabel had innocently blundered into a wrong start. Evidently the pleasure that the lad had expected from the meeting had gone astray.