“How did you manage it?” he said, looking at her with admiration in his eyes.
“Oh, it was quite simple,” she laughed. “There was nothing extraordinary in my joining the Bindanes on their trip; and then ...”
She told him how she had waited until Mr. Bindane was out of the way, and had then made a bolt for it.
“But what is the next step?” he asked. “What about the future?”
“Oh, man,” she cried, “don’t talk about the future—that can wait till you have time to think.”
The words may have had no particular significance, but to Daniel they seemed to be the most wonderful he had ever heard. They meant to him that she trusted him, that she placed her future in his hands, that she gave herself unreservedly to him. She left it to him to think out what he was going to do with her....
He looked at her with deep gratitude in his face; for she had, as it were, crowned him as lord of their destinies and enthroned him upon the very pinnacle of eventuality.
He could not take his eyes from her as she stood at the window, the reflected light of the sunset in her face, her well-proportioned figure seeming to be more vigorous, more athletic, than he had known it before. Her smile, always brilliant, was now intoxicating to him; and her eyes were filled with such tenderness that he could find no adequate response to their appeal. It was as though his kisses and his words of love were all insufficient to this great hour; and, with inward, joyous laughter, he found himself baffled in his search for means of expression.
He lifted her up in his arms, and kissed her throat and her shoulders and her knees. He lowered her to her feet again, and, with his arm about her, walked half-way across the room and back. He buried his face in her hair; held her hand to his mouth and kissed her fingers one by one; he sat her in a deck-chair, and, kneeling before her, laid his head for a moment upon her lap.
She was his, she belonged to him!—the thought went coursing through his brain in headlong career, breaking down his reserve, overthrowing the walls of the citadel of his being.
At last, forcing himself down from the heights to the practicalities, he went to the door and shouted for tea; but Hussein, who, like most loyal Egyptian servants, regarded himself, with due deference, as _ibn el bêt_, “son of the house,” or “one of the family” as we should say, had thrown himself whole-heartedly into his master’s excitement, and had already prepared the tea and had opened the choicest tin of biscuits in the store-cupboard.