I thought he could do that better
himself. All her pretence about being tired and wanting to go home broke down,
and she rocked herself to and fro in the saddle as she sobbed, and the hot
wind blew her black hair to leeward. I am not going to repeat what she said,
because she was utterly unstrung.
This, if you please, was the cynical Miss Copleigh. Here was I, almost an
utter stranger to her, trying to tell her that Saumarez loved her and she was
to come back to hear him say so! I believe I made myself understood, for she
gathered the gray together and made him hobble somehow, and we set off for the
tomb, while the storm went thundering down to Umballa and a few big drops of
warm rain fell. I found out that she had been standing close to Saumarez when
he proposed to her sister and had wanted to go home and cry in peace, as an
English girl should. She dabbled her eyes with her pocket-handkerchief as we
went along, and babbled to me out of sheer lightness of heart and hysteria.
That was perfectly unnatural; and yet, it seemed all right at the time and in
the place. All the world was only the two Copleigh girls, Saumarez and I,
ringed in with the lightning and the dark; and the guidance of this misguided
world seemed to lie in my hands.
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