I laughed. I would have given all I owned in the world to have had at that moment an interesting and conspicuous wound, for I knew how sympathy formed love, and how to a woman's mind a wound added interest to a man. A few weeks ago, though unwounded, I had at least been very thin and brown; but even of those mild attractions I had thoughtlessly allowed myself to be robbed by too high living and a kinder sun than the desert's. How I envied Bennett with his sunken eyes and tottering gait!
"The telegraph evidently mixed the names," I said. "It was Bennett who was shot."
"And you saved his life!" Penelope cried, forgetting herself.
However modest the man may be who hides his light under a bushel, it is always pleasing to him to have another lift the basket. As a matter of fact, on that morning at Omdurman it was almost as uncomfortable in the disordered and retreating ranks as it was in our rear, where Bennett lay crushed in the sand under his dead camel. If I did run back to him in the face of the oncoming horde of dervishes, a half-dozen of his own black troopers ran with me and helped to drag him to safety. It was an ordinary incident of the heat of battle, yet I did wish that Bennett were here to tell her about it, with his grateful exaggeration. To me fell the hard task not only of hiding my light, but of blowing it out.
"We got him away," I returned carelessly, accenting the pronoun as though the whole corps were concerned. "A lot of his men ran back to him and put him on my horse. I simply led him out of danger."
"Oh!" Penelope exclaimed in a tone of disappointment.
She looked over the plain; and I beside her, with my stick bent across my knee, studied her face, trying to read in it some promise of kindness and hope. But I found none. She seemed lost in the fair prospect. She had met an old friend and had spoken to him. That was enough. Now it mattered little whether he went away or stayed. It came to me then to try an old, old ruse to test the quality of her indifference.
To my consternation she rose, too, and began to move off carelessly, as though she expected me to follow her to the hotel to see Rufus Blight and then to bid her a casual farewell. I did not follow. Indifferent she might be, but my mind was made up that she should hear me. There was no longer any gulf between us. There was only the barrier of cool indifference which she had raised, and I would fight to break it down.