“If they see us,” she whispered to him, “they will think you have come here after the women.”

“But we could say——­” he began.

“There will be nothing to say,” she interrupted.  “Hush!  There he comes.”

Out of the tent crawled a man, lean and black and bearded, with a sheet wrapped around him.  He stood up and looked around, yawning.  The woman nestled closer to Dawson, who gripped instinctively on the bronze image.  The man walked to the parapet on their left and looked over, and then walked back to the tent and stood irresolutely, muttering to himself.  Squatted under the wall, Dawson found room amid the race of his disordered thoughts to wonder that he did not instantly see them.

He was coming towards them, and Dawson felt the bare shoulder that pressed against his arm shrug slightly.  The man was ten paces away, walking right on to them, and looking to the sky, when, with throbbing temples and tense lips, Dawson rose, ran at him, and gripped him.  He had the throat in the crutch of his right hand, and strangled the man’s yell as it was conceived.  They went down together, writhing and clutching, Dawson uppermost, the man under him scratching and slapping at him with open hands.  He drew up a knee and found a lean chest under it, drove it in, and choked his man to silence and unconsciousness.

“Take this, take this,” urged the woman, bending beside him.  She pressed her slender-bladed knife on him.  “Just a prick, and he is quite safe!”

Dawson rose.  “No,” he said.  “He’s still enough now.  No need to kill him.”  He looked at the body and from it to the woman.  “Didn’t I get him to rights?” he asked exultantly.

She raised her face to his.

“It was splendid,” she said.  “With only the bare hands to take an armed man——­”

“Armed!” repeated Dawson.

“Surely,” she answered.  “That, at least, is always sure.  See,” she pulled the man’s sheet wide.  Girt into a loin-cloth below was an ugly, broad blade.  “Yes, it was magnificent.  You are a man, my friend.”

“And you,” he said, thrilled by her adulation and, the proximity of her bare, gleaming bosom, “are a woman.”

“Then——­” she began spiritedly; but in a heat of cordial impulse he took her to him and kissed her hotly on the lips.

“I was wondering when it would come,” she said slowly, as he released her.  “When you spoke to the German about the bad word, I began to wonder.  I knew it would come.  Kiss me again, my friend, and we will go on.”

“Are we getting towards the landing-stage?” he asked her, as the next roof was crossed.  “I mustn’t miss my boat, you know.”

“Oh, that!” she answered.  “You want to go back?”

“Well, of course,” he replied, in some surprise.  “That’s what I was trying to do when I knocked at your door.  I’ve missed my dinner as it is.”

“Missed your dinner!” she repeated, with a bubble of mirth.  “Ye-es; you have lost that, but,”—­she came to him and laid a hand on his shoulder, speaking softly—­“but you have seen me.  Is it nothing, friend, that you have saved me?”