“Could you go to sleep?” he demanded.
She nodded. “I could,” she said. “I guess there ain’t the time,” she added.
“Yes, there is,” he said eagerly. “We can get down from here in no time. You rest yourself.”
She regarded him for a moment. Then, without a word, she drew her blanket toward her, rested her head upon it, and relaxed like a child. In a moment she lay sleeping.
Then he looked at her. All that day he had averted his eyes, in his shame. But now that there could be in her look no rebuke, no reminiscence of the night, he looked at her as freely as he had looked that day on the desert, when she had sat his horse before him. Only then his look had been a flame, and now it was as if the sight of her was to him a healing power. For she still trusted him. She was lying here asleep, and she had set him to watch. Immeasurably, she was giving him back his self-respect, restoring to him his own place in her eyes and in his own. He had no knowledge that this bore so strong a part in the creeping sweetness which possessed him. He only knew that he was happy, that he dreaded the time when she should awaken almost as much as he longed for it; and he hoped with childish intensity that the afternoon would never end.
That was an hour such as the man had never known. Women had followed him, tempted him, run from him, but never in his life had a woman either begged his help, as one being of another, or walked with him, comradely. And with women he had always moved as lord and dispenser, avoiding them, taking them for granted, occasionally pursuing them, but always as chief actor. Now, suddenly, he had become in his own sight, infinitely the lesser of the two; and even that grateful return of belief in himself was a thing which she was, so gently, bestowing. He sat, sunk in the newness of what had come upon him, making no effort to understand, and looking neither forward nor back. He was beset alike by the knowledge that she trusted him, and by the soft movement of her breathing and by the flushed ripeness of her, and by the fact that, at any second, she might waken and then smile upon him.
When, toward four o’clock, she did waken, her smile, that was as instant as at a child’s awakening, was straightway darkened by a cloud of fear.
“It’s late,” she said. “The train—can we get it now?”
“Can we get it now....” The Inger paused to taste this before he answered.