Earle's waiting for me.--I hate to leave you."
The stealthy brightness of her admiration changed to a slow, inscrutable
appeal. "Don't forget. Haven't you--a better friend?" And with an
instant, bold, and tantalizing grimace, she had vanished within.
* * * * *
To his homeward march, her cicadas shrilled the music of fifes. He, the
despised, the man to spare, now cocked up his helmet like fortune's
minion, dizzy with new honors. Nobody had ever praised him to his face.
And now she, she of all the world, had spoken words which he feared and
longed to believe, and which even said still less than her searching and
mysterious look.
On the top of his exultation, he reached the nunnery, and entered his
big, bare living-room, to find Heywood stretched in a wicker chair.
"Hallo, Rudie! I've asked myself to tiffin," drawled the lounger, from a
little tempest of blue smoke, tossed by the punkah. "How's the fair
Bertha?--Mausers all right? And by the way, did you make that inventory
of provisions?"
Rudolph faced him with a sudden conviction of guilt, of treachery to a
leader.
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