unflattering to the latter; and an unconscious softness would come into
her voice in conversing with him which was not a little trying to John
Ames.

For if there was one point upon which the latter had made up his mind,
it was that while Nidia was alone with him, and entirely under his care,
he must never for a moment allow his feelings to get the better of him.
To do so under the circumstances was, rightly or wrongly, to take an
advantage of the position, against which his principles rose up in
revolt. Yet there were times when his guard would insensibly slacken,
and his tone, too, would take on an unconscious softening.

They were fugitives, those two, hiding for their lives in the heart of a
savage and hostile land, wherein well-nigh every one of their own colour
had almost certainly been massacred, yet to one of them, at any rate,
the days that followed, that saw them hiding in and wandering through
this grim rock wilderness, were days of sheer unadulterated delight.
Life in the open entailed upon him no privation--he was used to it; to
rough it on coarse and scanty fare he never felt, and as a price to pay
for the happiness that was now his, why, it did not come in at all. To
awaken in the morning to the consciousness that the whole day should be
spent in the society and presence of this girl; that she was as
absolutely dependent upon him--upon his care and protection--as she was
upon the very air she breathed; that throughout the livelong day he
would have in his ears the music of her voice, under his gaze the sunny
witchery of that bright face, the blue eyes lighting up in rallying
mockery, or growing soft and dewy and serious according to the thoughts
discussed between them--all this was to John Ames rapture unutterable.
He looked back on his many communings in his solitary comings and
goings, and how the thought of her alone had possessed his whole being,
how he would sit for hours recalling every incident of their
acquaintanceship, even--so vivid was memory--going over all that was
said and done on each day of the same, and yet, running through all, the
hope of meeting again, somehow, somewhere. And now they had met--not as
he had all along pictured, under conventional circumstances and
surrounded by others, but as the survivors of savage massacre, who had
been wonderfully thrown together, having passed through an ordeal of
tragedy and blood. Her very life was in his hands, and by a sure and
certain inst