"Is Monseigneur a Mohammedan?"
Saint Hubert shrugged. "He believes in a God," he said evasively,
turning back to his writing.
Diana studied him curiously as he bent over his work. She smiled
when she thought of the mental picture she had drawn of Saint Hubert
before he came, and contrasted it with the real man under her eyes.
During the week that he had been in the camp he had forced her
liking and compelled her confidence by the sympathetic charm of his
manner. He had carried off a difficult position with a delicacy and
savoir-faire that had earned him her gratitude. He had saved her
a hundred humiliations with a tact that had been as spontaneous as it
had been unobtrusive. And they had the bond between them of the common
love they had for this strange leader of a strange tribe. What had been
the origin of the friendship between these utterly dissimilar men--a
friendship that seemed to go back to the days of their boyhood? The
question intrigued her and she pondered over it, lying quietly on the
divan, smoothing the hound's huge head resting on her knee.
The Vicomte wrote rapidly for some time and then flung down his pen
with an exclamation of relief, gathered up the loose sheets from the
floor and, stacking them in an orderly heap on the table, swung round
on his chair again. He looked at the girl's slender little figure lying
with the unconsciously graceful attitude of a child against the
heaped-up cushions, her face bent over the dog's rough, grey head, and
he felt an unwonted emotion stirring in him. The quick sympathy that
she had aroused from the first moment of seeing her had given place to
a deeper feeling that moved him profoundly, and with it a chivalrous
desire to protect, a longing to stand between her and the irremediable
disaster that loomed inevitably ahead of her.
She felt his concentrated gaze and looked up. "You have done your
work?"
"All I can do at the moment. Henri must unravel the rest; he has a
passion for hieroglyphics. He is an invaluable person; I could never
get on without him. He bullied me when we were boys together--at least
that is what I called it. He called it 'amusing Monsieur le Vicomte,'
and for the last fifteen years he has tyrannised over me
wholeheartedly." He laughed and snapped his fingers at Kopec, who
whined and rolled his eyes in his direction, but did not lift his head
from Diana's knee.
There was a pause, and Diana continued fondling the hound absently. "I
have read your books, Monsieur--all that Monseigneur has here," she
said at last, looking up gravely.