She put her hand to her eyes. Behind her
back Heyst spoke gently.
"Let us get on, Lena."
She walked ahead in silence. Heyst remarked that they had never been
out before during the hottest hours. It would do her no good, he feared.
This solicitude pleased and soothed her. She felt more and more like
herself--a poor London girl playing in an orchestra, and snatched out
from the humiliations, the squalid dangers of a miserable existence,
by a man like whom there was not, there could not be, another in this
world. She felt this with elation, with uneasiness, with an intimate
pride--and with a peculiar sinking of the heart.
"I am not easily knocked out by any such thing as heat," she said
decisively.
"Yes, but I don't forget that you're not a tropical bird."
"You weren't born in these parts, either," she returned.
"No, and perhaps I haven't even your physique. I am a transplanted
being. Transplanted! I ought to call myself uprooted--an unnatural state
of existence; but a man is supposed to stand anything."
She looked back at him and received a smile. He told her to keep in the
shelter of the forest path, which was very still and close, full of heat
if free from glare. Now and then they had glimpses of the company's old
clearing blazing with light, in which the black stumps of trees stood
charred, without shadows, miserable and sinister.
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