Rudolph stared.

“Oh, you funny, funny boy!” she cried, with a bewildering laugh, of delight and pride.  “I hate people all prim and circumspect, and you—­You’d have flown back there straight at him, before my—­before all the others.  That’s why I like you so!—­But you must leave that horrid, lying fellow to me.”

All unaware, she had led him along the blinding white wall of the Forrester compound, and halted in the hot shadow that lay under the tiled gateway.  As though timidly, her hand stole up and rested on his forearm.

“So sorry.”  The confined space, narrow and covered, gave to her voice a plaintive ring.  “That’s twice you protected me, and I hurt you.—­You are different.  This doesn’t happen between people, often.  When you did—­that, for me, yesterday, didn’t it seem different and rather splendid, and—­like a book?”

“It seemed nonsense,” replied Rudolph, sturdily.  “The heat.  We were fools.”

She laughed again, and at close range watched him from under consciously drooping lashes that almost veiled a liquid brilliancy.  Everywhere the cicadas kept the heat vibrating with their strident buzz.  It recalled some other widespread mist of treble music, long ago.  The trilling of frogs, that had been, before.

“You dear, brave boy,” she said slowly.  “You’re so honest, too.  I’m not ungrateful.  Do you know what I’d like—­Oh, there’s the amah!"

She drew back, with an impatient gesture.

“That stupid, fat Mrs. 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.

“Yes,” he stammered; “I—­I’ll get it for you.”

He passed into his bedroom, caught up the written list from a table, and for a moment stood as if dreaming.  Before him the Mausers, polished and orderly, shone in their new rack against the lime-coated wall.  Though appearing to scan them, Rudolph saw nothing but his inward confusion.  “After all this man did for me,” he mused.  What had loosed the bond, swept away all the effects?