“Nay, Mistress Dare, the effect lies too deep perchance for mortal eyes to see it. I was once wont to consider women so many smocks and kirtles that clothed the air, but lately mine eyes have read the truth.” His manner was in no way passionate, but only deep with reverence and admiration. The passion lay iron-bound within him. Only his eyes could not utterly conceal its presence; and, looking up to them, she became once more a child. With all others she was a woman, often imperious and always perfectly at ease, yet with this man she was forever forced to assume the defensive, not against him, but herself. She looked up at him now for the first time with a glance of analysis. Until to-day she had never considered Vytal’s character in detail. Hitherto he had been a force, intangible, but dominant, like the tide or wind. But now that emergencies and crises had revealed her heart to her mind, against all that mind’s resistance, he, too, became actual, and despite herself she knew him to be the one man whom she could love. Yet the word “love” was unutterable even in her depths. She called it by no name, nor applied a word to his own devotion. Only the thought came to her, as she met his look, that this inexplicable, taciturn Fate bending over her would become a child like herself beneath the touch of a requited—but even then she interrupted her thoughts with speech. “I could not have consented to leave our colony, even if Roger Prat—” she hesitated.
Vytal’s manner grew more stern. “Roger Prat? What has he to do with it?”
She looked troubled. “Oh, naught, believe me—I think he—but no—I mean—”
“What?”
“He believed ’twas for the best, and so he demanded that I—should stay.”
Vytal grasped his sword-hilt. “Is ’t possible he dared to interfere? Do you mean ’twas Prat suggested hostages? Can it be my own man who hath exposed you to the hazard of remaining?”
“No, stay, Captain Vytal. Harm not the fellow. Dost not—” But she broke off suddenly, her head drooping to hide the deep flush which had mounted to her cheeks.
“’Twas impertinence,” declared Vytal, as though to himself. “Nay, more, it was profanation to thwart the will of Heaven, by which you would have been saved from this cruel life.”
She looked up at him again, a wistful doubt in her eyes. “Then you—would have—me return?”
He drew himself to his full height in the old soldierly way, as though facing an ordeal. “I would.”