“You should know that without asking me,” she said.
“It is going to be a cold night,” he said. “You’re warm now. But it’s nearly two o’clock and the cold of the ground will strike through your clothes. I want you to share my warmth. If you aren’t warm you won’t sleep. And it’s important you should sleep. You mustn’t take any notice of it. You mustn’t mind.”
She made no reply. It seemed very strange to her, even though she told herself that there was no real reason why it should seem strange. And so they settled down for the night, lying very close together, with M‘Crae’s body pressed to hers; and when, a little later, she began to shiver, as he had told her, and found that she had huddled instinctively closer to his warmth, she felt him respond to her presence, placing his arm about her for protection. Even in her state between sleep and waking she felt her sense of modesty weakly rebel against the idea that she should be lying under the moon with the arm of a stranger about her. But when she reflected on the matter it seemed to her that in fact she knew M‘Crae more intimately than any other man in the world, and smiling to herself at the strangeness of the whole business, she fell asleep again.
M‘Crae did not sleep. . . . He had many matters for thinking, and even though they had made good travelling from Luguru, having left the mission twelve or fourteen miles behind, he felt that it was still his duty to watch. At this distance from Luguru it was more than probable that their pursuers would leave them alone, and particularly in the night season, which the Waluguru fear; but even if he were free from the menace of the armed savages, no sleeping man could be wholly safe from lions in a country so full of game. He wanted, too, in his own methodical way, to make his plans for the next day’s journey, to calculate how far their resources of food and water would carry them, to set his course by that pale starlight for the journey towards the Central Railway with its relative civilisation.
He calculated that from the nullah in which they now lay to their object must be close on eighty miles. Of the lie of the land he knew next to nothing, for he had entered the German province from the north; but he knew enough of the general nature of Africa to guess that the country would lie higher towards the east, and that the rivers, draining to the Wami, as did the M’ssente, would be spread out like the fingers of a hand from the north to the south-west, and farther south in the line of the Equator. It seemed to him, therefore, that they could hardly ever be wholly lacking in water. But he didn’t know. There was no way in which he could know. He reckoned that if he were travelling alone he could make almost certain of doing his twenty miles a day; but this time he was not travelling alone, and he had no knowledge of the strength or endurance of a woman, or how her delicate feet would stand the strain of walking day after day. That night he had made her loosen her shoes. He could see them now, ridiculously slender things, lying beside her. It was not the fact that they were unpractical which impressed him so much as that they were small. Seeing this token of Eva’s fragility, he was overwhelmed with a kind of pity for her littleness. He supposed that for all her high and splendid spirit she was really no more than a child; and feeling thus incalculably tender toward her, he found that, in the most unconscious way in the world, the arm which he had placed about her to keep her warm when she had shivered would have tightened in a caress.