She arrived, breathless, and beautifully flushed. M‘Crae was lying at the end of the _banda_ next the path. She could see that he had been watching them all the time, even though he could not have heard them. Through the flimsy wall of grass he had pushed the muzzle of his rifle.
He smiled up at her. “You see, I had him covered,” he said. “Now you’d better tell me all about it.”
Then, quite against her will, she began to cry, making queer little noises of which she would have been ashamed if she had been able to think about them. It had to come . . .
To M‘Crae the position, in its sudden intimacy, was infinitely embarrassing. At any time it would have been painful for him to have seen a woman cry; but Eva was no ordinary woman in his eyes. She had brought, in a little time, a tender and very beautiful ideal into his life. He had thought of her as the incarnation of all the lovely and desirable things which had passed for ever out of his grasp, and chiefly of youth, which carries an atmosphere of beauty in itself. But even more than this, he had worshipped her naturalness and bravery, so that it was a terrible thing for him to see her in tears. He knew that no everyday trouble could have broken her simple and confident courage, and the consciousness of this adorable weakness overwhelmed him even more than his admiration of her strength. He saw in a moment what a child she was, and longed to protect her, as a young man and a lover might have done. He realised suddenly that the right to do this had passed from him, years ago . . . years ago. His eyes filled with tears, and he could do nothing; for the only things which he might naturally have done were obviously included in the prerogative of that parental interest which is the name under which the middle-aged man most often hides a furtive sensuality. Altogether, the matter was too harrowing in its complications for an honest man to deal with, and M‘Crae, as we have said, found himself in these days a mass of the most sensitive scruples. For all this he felt that he couldn’t merely sit there with tears in his eyes and do nothing. It was natural for him to put out his hand and take hold of her arm. Though she had often enough been nearer to him than this in her ministrations, he had never actually touched her before. Through the sodden muslin of her sleeve his fingers became conscious of her arm’s softness.