Volume One—Chapter Fourteen.

Volume One—Chapter Fourteen.Lilian.“There. I’m quite ready now. I’m so sorry if I have delayed you, and I fear I have.”“Not at all. We are starting in very good time as it is, and have the whole day before us.”The place is the drawing-room of an hotel in Grahamstown; the time, rather early in the morning; and the first of the two speakers, a tall, beautiful girl, who has just finished fastening together two or three articles of light hand-baggage as the second enters to tell her that the conveyance is all ready at the door. She wears a close-fitting dress of cool white, which, though making her appear taller, sets off to the fullest advantage a graceful, undulating figure. Waves of dark hair, touched, as it were, with a glint of bronze, half conceal the smooth brow, and the beautiful oval face, with its straight, delicately-chiselled features, is most killingly and becomingly framed in a large garden hat, lined with soft lace. The eyes are of that difficult-to-determine hue which is best defined as green hazel, and a sensitive curve about the lips imparts to the whole face a tinge of melancholy when in repose. In fact, there is a trifle of coldness about its normal expression. But when it lights up—when its owner smiles—as she now does very sweetly upon him, who is to be her travelling companion and escort throughout that day—then its charm becomes dangerous, so inexpressibly captivating is it.“Is sweetly pretty, and has the loveliest eyes I ever saw,” had been Mrs Brathwaite’s dictum. And Claverton there and then mentally acquitted the old lady of one jot of exaggeration as his glance rested for the first time upon Lilian Strange when she entered the room prepared for the journey—fresh, cool, and in all the composure of her stately beauty. She greeted him perfectly naturally and unaffectedly, and apologised for delay, real or imaginary, as we have seen.He had called at the hotel the evening before, to deliver a note from Mrs Brathwaite, and to inform Miss Strange in person about her journey. In the latter object he was disappointed. Miss Strange sent down a message, apologising for being unable to see him, on the ground of fatigue. She would, however, be quite ready to start at the hour named. And Claverton, beyond a slight curiosity to inspect one who would be for a considerable time an inmate of the same household as himself, didn’t care one way or another. Miss Strange would be there all right on the morrow, and he meanwhile would go and look up a friend at the very poor attempt at a club which the city boasted.He had expected to see a pretty girl, possibly a very pretty girl, but nothing like this. As it has been said, he was not a susceptible man. In point of fact, he rather looked down on the fair sex, a few individual members of it excepted. Yet now, as he handed his charge into the light buggy which stood waiting at the door, he was conscious of an unwonted quickening of the pulse. Not then was he able to analyse the subtle fascination of her beauty and of her manner, the extraordinary charm of her voice—such a voice as it was, too; low, rich, musical; the kind of voice that could not by any possibility have belonged to a plain woman.“Thanks; they are not in my way in the least,” said that bewildering voice as Claverton was making impossible efforts to move certain parcels in the bottom of the trap—impossible, because of the very limited space afforded by the confines of a buggy—at the same time keeping a firm hand on the rather fresh pair of horses which were bowling down the street at a fine pace. Early as it was, the streets were filling with traffic; huge loads of wool on buck-waggons from up the country crawling in behind their long spans of oxen; farmers’ carts and buggies; horsemen; and everywhere the inevitable native, male and female.“The worst of it is that the bare fact of coming to the town entails upon one multifold commissions, utterly regardless of space or carrying power,” he answered. “Look at those bundles, for instance. Not a third of what I was to have fetched, and shall catch it for not bringing out.”Lilian laughed.“Never mind. I’ll bear witness in your favour. And now tell me, when do we reach Seringa Vale?”“Not before sundown. I’m afraid you’ll be dreadfully done up. It’s very spirited of you to travel two days running like this. I wonder you didn’t allow yourself a day here to rest after coming up all the way from Port Elizabeth yesterday.”“It was tiring, certainly. But I’ve had a good night’s rest, and this sort of travelling is quite luxurious after the passenger-cart. Is it going to be very hot?”“I’m afraid it’ll be warm, but not dusty, which is something to be thankful for. The heavy shower in the night has done that much for us. Look! Grahamstown shows well from here.”A curve in the road brought the city into full view, lying beneath, embowered in its bosky gardens.“Yes. But I don’t see anything to admire in these colonial towns. They are not even picturesque. Frightfully dusty, oppressively hot, and streets and buildings absolutely hideous.”“I agree with you. Look at this one, for instance. That mound of baked clay, plastered up wet and left to dry, which we passed at starting and which can hardly be distinguished now, doesn’t look much like a cathedral, does it? Yet it is. Then that fifth-rate mongrel Corn Exchange you see—there—is the Eastern Districts Court, second temple of Justice in the land. That square barn-like wool-store, beyond the clay cathedral, is a Methodist chapel with a truly appalling front. It is the prize barracoon of that connexion, and its habitués fondly cherish the conviction that it is a second Milan. The building away there against the hill is to be admired, isn’t it? Built for a barrack it remains a barrack, though it is now a public hospital. The town is pretty, thanks to its situation and trees, but there isn’t a decent-looking building in it.”“I want to see something of the country,” went on Lilian. “It ought to be lovely, judging from what I saw of it coming along in the post-cart yesterday. And I’ve seen nothing of it as yet.”“Here we are, then. What do you think of that?” said her companion, as, having crested the hill which shut the city from view, he whipped up his horses and they sped merrily along an elevated flat, dashing aside the dewdrops which lay thickly studding the short grass like a field of diamonds. The sun was not long up, and a white morning mist hung here and there among the sprays of the bush, but overhead all was dazzling blue. The view was extensive. Wooded ridges melted away afar in the soft morning light, and in the distant background the crescent range of the Great Winterberg rose purple and dim.“Oh, but this is lovely!” cried Lilian. “Don’t laugh at me, Mr Claverton, but it is like drinking in new life after being pent up in a dusty town.”“I’d rather be shot than laugh at you,” he answered, with an earnestness very unwonted in him. “I am only too glad you should find anything to enjoy in what I feared would be to you a very tedious journey. Still more glad am I that it has been my luck to escort you.”It was about the first genuine compliment he had ever paid to a woman in his life, and yet he seemed totally unconscious of intending any compliment at all. He could hardly take his glance off the beautiful, animated face beside him. And how was it that this same escort duty had fallen to his lot? When Lilian Strange found out at nearly the last moment that the opportunity on which she relied of getting to Seringa Vale had fallen through, Mr Brathwaite had made arrangements to go to Grahamstown and fetch her himself. But a sharp attack of rheumatism precluded this, and Hicks, who otherwise would have been told off on this mission, and who had his own reasons for not wishing to be away from home two days, easily prevailed on his friend to go instead of him.On they sped, now ascending a hill at a foot’s pace, now bowling briskly down the next declivity, as the road wound over the rolling country. To Lilian the journey, so far from being a tedious one, was wholly delightful. She was vividly interested in everything. Even the little meercats, which sat upright on their hind legs a few yards from the road and then bolted into their burrows at the approach of the horses, came in for a share of her notice and admiration. A solitary secretary bird, stalking away down in the hollow, became the subject of numerous inquiries, and she gazed with awe upon a cloud of great white vultures soaring overhead bound for some defunct horse or sheep, appearing from nowhere and disappearing as mysteriously. To the English girl, with her keen love of Nature, even these insignificant representatives of wild African animal life were full of interest.They passed a large ostrich farm lying beneath them on the slope, and she could hardly believe her companion’s statement that the distant black specks at the farther ends of their respective enclosures were as formidable as the traditional mad bull, until a large troop of ten-months-old ostriches, under charge of herds, swept past, and he drew her attention to their size, and the strength of those long legs terminating in a sharp, horny toe, capable of ripping a man up. But the birds looked very handsome, very picturesque as they careered by, their snowy plumes extended and waving, and she was delighted with the picture they made, though her enjoyment was tempered with alarm as the horses showed signs of restiveness. But Claverton reassured her, and the ostriches and their keepers were soon left far behind.“You live at Seringa Vale, do you not, Mr Claverton?”“Well, yes; I do at present. I am jackarooing there, as they say in Australia, which is to say that I am imbibing instruction in the craft in consideration of my valuable services.”“And are you going to settle out here, then?”“To settle! H’m! How do you know I wasn’t born and bred out here?”“I suppose because there’s some sort of secret sign by which one importation can detect another,” answered Lilian. “I don’t believe you have been out here as long as I have.”“Do I look so thoroughly the ‘new chum,’ then? Point out the conspicuous sign of ‘rawness,’ that I may at once eradicate it, if it is worth eradicating, that is.”“No. I refuse to reveal my masonic sign,” she answered, gaily; “but I know I am right in my conjecture. I could tell the moment I saw you. Am I not right? Now confess!”“Yes and no. That is to say, it is only three months since I left England this time; but before that I was out here in South Africa for several years.”“Then I cannot claim seniority of standing, after all. Are there any more ‘importations’ at Seringa Vale?”“Yes. Hicks. But he’s so thoroughly acclimatised that he don’t count. You and I are exiles and sojourners in a far country. I foresee we shall be talking British ‘shop’ to a grievous extent,” said Claverton, not that he cared a rush about England, or had any great reason to, for the matter of that, but it would establish anententewith his beautiful travelling companion, a something quite between themselves. He was surprised to notice a wearied and even pained expression flit across the lovely face, like the shadow of a cloud passing over the bright smooth surface of a mountain lake.“I don’t know. I think I would rather forget all about England,” she replied, sadly. “It is a subject with no fascination for me. As I’m here in this country I want to like it, and it is highly probable that I shall, at any rate during the next two months. By-the-bye, what dear old people Mr and Mrs Brathwaite are!”“That they are,” assented the other, heartily. And then for the life of him he could not help subsiding into silence. She had a history, then. She would fain forget the land of her birth. It was not wholly the stern law of necessity that had banished her to a distant land to fight the rough, hard battle of life. There was another cause, and glancing at her as she sat beside him, Claverton thought he could in a measure guess at the nature of that cause. His pulses were strangely stirred, and even then he was conscious of a longing to comfort her, of a wild, unreasoning resentment against some person unknown. Remarkable, wasn’t it, considering he had only seen her for the first time in his life that morning, and that now it was still far short of midday?But two persons of opposite sexes, both young, both goodly to look upon, and under circumstances situated such as these two, will, I trow, find it difficult to preserve silence for long—seated side by side in the circumscribed space of a buggy. Lilian was the first to break it.“What was that?” she asked, eagerly, as a loud resounding bark echoed forth from the hillside above them.“Only a baboon. Look, there he is—that black speck up there; and the others are not far off.”They were driving through a wild and narrow pass. High overhead great masses of rock cut the skyline in fantastic piles, castellated here, riven there, and apparently about to crumble in pieces, and hurl themselves down upon the road. Thick bush grew right down to the road winding along the side of the hill, which here and there fell straight away from it in rather an alarming and precipitous manner.It was just at the most alarming of these places that a few puffs of dust and a crack or two of a whip betokened the approach of waggons, and the next moment the foremost of them appeared round a jutting corner of rock. Claverton muttered an imprecation as he noted that the oxen were without a leader, straggling across the very narrow road at their own sweet will, and bearing down upon him and his charge a great deal faster than he liked. The waggon, loaded sky high with wool bales, was still a couple of hundred yards off, but the road from it to the buggy was a brisk declivity; there seemed very insufficient brake on, and no sign of any one in charge. One of two things was likely to happen: either the buggy would be splintered into matchwood against the inner side of the road, or hurled into perdition over the outer one, by the ponderous mass now bearing down uncontrolled upon it. Claverton reined in his horses and hallooed angrily.An ugly, mud-coloured head rose from the apex of the pile; then apparently subsided.“Where’s your ‘leader,’ youschepsel?” he shouted in Dutch. “Get off and stop your fore oxen, or, by God, I’ll shoot them dead on the spot.”The situation was critical, it must be remembered. A sooty imp of a boy glided to the front of the span, and succeeded in bringing them up just in time. The huge, unwieldy machine rolled creaking past the buggy, narrowly grazing it with the wool bales. The Hottentot driver raised his ugly head and leered insolently.“Hey, you, Engelschman! Don’t you know how to pass a waggon yet?” he shouted.Quickly Claverton stood up, and by dint of a dexterous “flick,” cut the fellow with his driving-whip in such wise as to chip a weal of skin out of his face, and then the pace of the passing vehicles carried him out of reach.The Hottentot yelled and cursed with rage and pain; but there was something so threatening in Claverton’s face and the sudden movement he made as if to descend and make a further example of him that the fellow thought better of it, and dropped the empty grog bottle which he had been about to shy after the trap. He solaced himself, however, with a shower of parting curses.“Lord, Lord! To think that I should have to sit still and be cheeked by a dirty drunken Tottie,” said Claverton to himself yet aloud, as if oblivious of his companion. Yet he had to. He could hardly drop the reins and leave her there in the middle of an excessively narrow and dangerous bit of road, with a pair of very fresh and somewhat restive horses on hand, while he went to wreak further vengeance on the impudent rascal whose carelessness might have been productive of a serious catastrophe. He was handicapped altogether.It was an earnest of real life. By himself, with only himself to think of, he could take care of himself. In charge of another, would he not have to swallow tons and tons over and above the traditional peck of “matter in the wrong place” without a murmur? He would be handicapped altogether. Philosopher as he was, it was hardly likely that such a consideration should obtrude at this moment.The other waggon was engineered by a couple of quiet-looking and civil Kafirs, who gave them plenty of roadway and the good-morning as they passed.Claverton stole a glance at his companion’s face. She had been not a little startled, he could see that, yet she kept her composure, and the fact pleased him. Most women under the circumstances would have let fly exclamations of alarm, perhaps shrieked, possibly even might have grabbed convulsively at the reins—that most blindly idiotic and utterly exasperating phase of feminine scare upon wheels. This one, however, only changed colour ever so little, but did and said nothing.“Here we are at an ‘hotel,’ as they call it in this country,” he remarked, pointing out a seedy-looking domicile, like unto a fifth-rate Dutch farmhouse, which hove in sight before them. “We can either stop there, or drive on a little farther and outspan in theveldt, whichever you prefer.”“Oh, do let us outspan in theveldt,” answered Lilian, gleefully. “The drive is lovely, and a picnic in the middle of it will be quite the right thing.”“Of course it will—or rather two picnics, for we shall have to outspan again. Look, we don’t lose much by giving that barracoon the go-by,” he went on, as they passed the edifice in question. “Goat chops very tough, pumpkin and rice, and Cape sherry, are about the only items in its bill of fare, I venture to predict.”“Horrible!” declared Lilian, with a laughing grimace.They drove on a little farther, and halted in a beautiful spot, by a pool of clear, but brackish water, thickly overhung with bush and trailing plants, where Lilian was delighted with the colony of pendulous finks’ nests swaying to and fro as their startled occupants dashed in and out, chirping volubly. Claverton took the horses to the water, then knee-haltered and allowed them to roll while he placed on the ground one of the couple of bundles of oat-hay which were carried in the buggy for their benefit. Then he returned to his charge.“I must apologise, Miss Strange. The rule of theveldtis not that of society. Here it is, ‘horses first.’”He spread the wraps, which kind, thoughtful Mrs Brathwaite had sent for Lilian’s use, under a shady tree, making her a comfortable seat. Then he unearthed the commissariat, of which the staple articles were a chicken and a bottle of Moselle.“But this is far too luxurious,” protested Lilian, her beautiful face sparkling with animation. She was thoroughly enjoying the unconventionally of the whole thing. “I declare it does not seem like camping in the bush if we are to revel in luxury.”“Take it easy while you can. That’s the secret of true philosophy. The goat chops and pumpkin and rice will come, all in good time.”She laughed gaily. Then she threw off her large straw hat, and pushed up her dark hair as if to ease it of the weight. Not a detail of the movement or its effect escaped her companion. He had not yet seen her without her hat. It is surprising what a difference this outdoor appendage makes in the appearance of some women. He noted, without surprise, that Lilian Strange looked equally beautiful either way.“Mr Claverton, why don’t you smoke?” she asked, as, having lunched, there was a dreamy pause in the conversation.“I thought you might object. But—how do you know I indulge in the chimney trick?”“Object? No, I’m not so selfish as that. And as for how I knew, I might answer all men do, but I won’t. The fact is, you made a quite unconscious and mechanical dive at your pocket, and brought out half a pipe. I’ll give you credit that the movewasquite unconscious.”“It was, upon my honour. What a magician you are—you notice everything.”It has been stated that Lilian Strange possessed an extraordinarily dangerous and captivating smile. She was in one of her softest moods now, thoroughly enjoying the fresh air and wild, extensive scenery; and the drive, the impromptu picnicà deux, and above all her late emancipation from distasteful drudgery amid uncongenial surroundings, and the prospect of two months’ rest from the same. Then she had taken a great liking to her travelling escort; short as had been the period of their acquaintance. So that now as she lay back, laughing over the quaint dryness of the said escort’s remarks, it could not be but that her winning and attractive spell should weave itself around him to the full. This girl was something quite new in Claverton’s experience. The soft, sweet tones of her voice, her glorious beauty, her very ways and movements, seemed to cast a glamour over him such as he had never known before in the course of his life. Bright, teasing Ethel Brathwaite, blue-eyed, sunny, impulsive, seemed poor clay when contrasted with this new arrival with the lovely, expressive face and the undulating, sensuous form—so stately and yet so unaffected and appreciative—so cold of demeanour, at times, and withal so sweet and considerate. Yet nineteen men out of twenty would have given the preference to Ethel; but then it may be that this other one would have favoured the nineteen with the coldness devoid of the consideration.Be this as it may, Claverton was certainly the twentieth in both senses, and, as they sat there, resting in the golden sunshine, the drowsy air around them made musical by the whistling of spreuws and the hum of summer insects, he, at any rate, found himself wishing that that hour might last throughout an eternity.And the curious part of it was that he had not known her for hours enough to make a double figure.But time cannot be trifled with, and they were due at Seringa Vale before dark. So the horses were put to in a trice.“Can’t I help you in any way?” said Lilian. “It seems so hard that you should have all the trouble while I sit still and look on.”“It’s no trouble at all,” answered the other, tugging vigorously at a refractory strap. “I wouldn’t let you bother about this sort of thing for the world. In fact, I am only too glad that you are not tired to death with the long, hot ride. And I think we’ll put the hood up, for there’s no shade between this and the next outspan.”Now came the hottest stage of the journey. The full glare of the sun focussed down into the broad valley, beat fiercely upon the tent of the buggy, and, but for the rapid movement creating its own draught, there was not a breath of air. Lilian began to feel drowsy and could have pleaded guilty to an incipient headache, but she did not complain. Her companion, however, detected the tired look in her eyes, and was greatly concerned; but she laughed it off. She would be all right again when it got cooler, she said. It was really very silly of her, but she was just a trifle below par.On this point he rather vehemently reassured her. Why, he himself often felt as if about to get a sunstroke riding through these long, hot valleys, just in the middle of the day—and he was a tolerably well-seasoned traveller. But it is to be feared that, for once in his life, he forgot to spare the horses in his anxiety to reach the end of that stage.Lilian, however, forgot her fatigue, as after the next outspan they wended up the rugged, but picturesque bush-road, in the golden light of the waning afternoon. They were in shade for the most part now, and the air grew cooler as they ascended gradually out of the stifling valley, where the river they had crossed a little while ago, flowed sparkling in the sun like a silver thread. Opposite, a row of stiff euphorbia reared their plumed heads, their stems, straight and regular as a line of organ-pipes, standing out from the darksome, rocky glen behind them like the bars of a gloomy cage enclosing some ferocious beast. There, a great cliff, overhung with lichens and monkey ropes, starting capriciously from among the greenness, and everywhere a shining sea of bush; not silent, either, but resounding with evidence of animal and insect life. Far away, almost inaudible, the harsh bark of the sentinel baboon; close at hand, oppressive in its vociferation, the shrill chirrup of crickets. Hoopoes were softly calling to each other from the tangled recesses of some cool and shady nook; and a bright louri, in all the pride of his crimson wings and glossy plumage, darted across the road.When they arrived at Seringa Vale, all its inmates were at the door to welcome Lilian.“I hope Arthur took great care of you, my dear,” said Mrs Brathwaite, the first genial greetings over.“I have to thank Mr Claverton for taking the greatest possible care of me,” answered Lilian, flashing at him one of her sweetest smiles.For a brief second their eyes met. One standing there noted both those glances and read them like an open book—read in one, possibility; in the other, certainty. And Ethel was forced to admit that her aunt’s description of their visitor’s attractions was not one whit exaggerated.And it had all come about in a single day.

“There. I’m quite ready now. I’m so sorry if I have delayed you, and I fear I have.”

“Not at all. We are starting in very good time as it is, and have the whole day before us.”

The place is the drawing-room of an hotel in Grahamstown; the time, rather early in the morning; and the first of the two speakers, a tall, beautiful girl, who has just finished fastening together two or three articles of light hand-baggage as the second enters to tell her that the conveyance is all ready at the door. She wears a close-fitting dress of cool white, which, though making her appear taller, sets off to the fullest advantage a graceful, undulating figure. Waves of dark hair, touched, as it were, with a glint of bronze, half conceal the smooth brow, and the beautiful oval face, with its straight, delicately-chiselled features, is most killingly and becomingly framed in a large garden hat, lined with soft lace. The eyes are of that difficult-to-determine hue which is best defined as green hazel, and a sensitive curve about the lips imparts to the whole face a tinge of melancholy when in repose. In fact, there is a trifle of coldness about its normal expression. But when it lights up—when its owner smiles—as she now does very sweetly upon him, who is to be her travelling companion and escort throughout that day—then its charm becomes dangerous, so inexpressibly captivating is it.

“Is sweetly pretty, and has the loveliest eyes I ever saw,” had been Mrs Brathwaite’s dictum. And Claverton there and then mentally acquitted the old lady of one jot of exaggeration as his glance rested for the first time upon Lilian Strange when she entered the room prepared for the journey—fresh, cool, and in all the composure of her stately beauty. She greeted him perfectly naturally and unaffectedly, and apologised for delay, real or imaginary, as we have seen.

He had called at the hotel the evening before, to deliver a note from Mrs Brathwaite, and to inform Miss Strange in person about her journey. In the latter object he was disappointed. Miss Strange sent down a message, apologising for being unable to see him, on the ground of fatigue. She would, however, be quite ready to start at the hour named. And Claverton, beyond a slight curiosity to inspect one who would be for a considerable time an inmate of the same household as himself, didn’t care one way or another. Miss Strange would be there all right on the morrow, and he meanwhile would go and look up a friend at the very poor attempt at a club which the city boasted.

He had expected to see a pretty girl, possibly a very pretty girl, but nothing like this. As it has been said, he was not a susceptible man. In point of fact, he rather looked down on the fair sex, a few individual members of it excepted. Yet now, as he handed his charge into the light buggy which stood waiting at the door, he was conscious of an unwonted quickening of the pulse. Not then was he able to analyse the subtle fascination of her beauty and of her manner, the extraordinary charm of her voice—such a voice as it was, too; low, rich, musical; the kind of voice that could not by any possibility have belonged to a plain woman.

“Thanks; they are not in my way in the least,” said that bewildering voice as Claverton was making impossible efforts to move certain parcels in the bottom of the trap—impossible, because of the very limited space afforded by the confines of a buggy—at the same time keeping a firm hand on the rather fresh pair of horses which were bowling down the street at a fine pace. Early as it was, the streets were filling with traffic; huge loads of wool on buck-waggons from up the country crawling in behind their long spans of oxen; farmers’ carts and buggies; horsemen; and everywhere the inevitable native, male and female.

“The worst of it is that the bare fact of coming to the town entails upon one multifold commissions, utterly regardless of space or carrying power,” he answered. “Look at those bundles, for instance. Not a third of what I was to have fetched, and shall catch it for not bringing out.”

Lilian laughed.

“Never mind. I’ll bear witness in your favour. And now tell me, when do we reach Seringa Vale?”

“Not before sundown. I’m afraid you’ll be dreadfully done up. It’s very spirited of you to travel two days running like this. I wonder you didn’t allow yourself a day here to rest after coming up all the way from Port Elizabeth yesterday.”

“It was tiring, certainly. But I’ve had a good night’s rest, and this sort of travelling is quite luxurious after the passenger-cart. Is it going to be very hot?”

“I’m afraid it’ll be warm, but not dusty, which is something to be thankful for. The heavy shower in the night has done that much for us. Look! Grahamstown shows well from here.”

A curve in the road brought the city into full view, lying beneath, embowered in its bosky gardens.

“Yes. But I don’t see anything to admire in these colonial towns. They are not even picturesque. Frightfully dusty, oppressively hot, and streets and buildings absolutely hideous.”

“I agree with you. Look at this one, for instance. That mound of baked clay, plastered up wet and left to dry, which we passed at starting and which can hardly be distinguished now, doesn’t look much like a cathedral, does it? Yet it is. Then that fifth-rate mongrel Corn Exchange you see—there—is the Eastern Districts Court, second temple of Justice in the land. That square barn-like wool-store, beyond the clay cathedral, is a Methodist chapel with a truly appalling front. It is the prize barracoon of that connexion, and its habitués fondly cherish the conviction that it is a second Milan. The building away there against the hill is to be admired, isn’t it? Built for a barrack it remains a barrack, though it is now a public hospital. The town is pretty, thanks to its situation and trees, but there isn’t a decent-looking building in it.”

“I want to see something of the country,” went on Lilian. “It ought to be lovely, judging from what I saw of it coming along in the post-cart yesterday. And I’ve seen nothing of it as yet.”

“Here we are, then. What do you think of that?” said her companion, as, having crested the hill which shut the city from view, he whipped up his horses and they sped merrily along an elevated flat, dashing aside the dewdrops which lay thickly studding the short grass like a field of diamonds. The sun was not long up, and a white morning mist hung here and there among the sprays of the bush, but overhead all was dazzling blue. The view was extensive. Wooded ridges melted away afar in the soft morning light, and in the distant background the crescent range of the Great Winterberg rose purple and dim.

“Oh, but this is lovely!” cried Lilian. “Don’t laugh at me, Mr Claverton, but it is like drinking in new life after being pent up in a dusty town.”

“I’d rather be shot than laugh at you,” he answered, with an earnestness very unwonted in him. “I am only too glad you should find anything to enjoy in what I feared would be to you a very tedious journey. Still more glad am I that it has been my luck to escort you.”

It was about the first genuine compliment he had ever paid to a woman in his life, and yet he seemed totally unconscious of intending any compliment at all. He could hardly take his glance off the beautiful, animated face beside him. And how was it that this same escort duty had fallen to his lot? When Lilian Strange found out at nearly the last moment that the opportunity on which she relied of getting to Seringa Vale had fallen through, Mr Brathwaite had made arrangements to go to Grahamstown and fetch her himself. But a sharp attack of rheumatism precluded this, and Hicks, who otherwise would have been told off on this mission, and who had his own reasons for not wishing to be away from home two days, easily prevailed on his friend to go instead of him.

On they sped, now ascending a hill at a foot’s pace, now bowling briskly down the next declivity, as the road wound over the rolling country. To Lilian the journey, so far from being a tedious one, was wholly delightful. She was vividly interested in everything. Even the little meercats, which sat upright on their hind legs a few yards from the road and then bolted into their burrows at the approach of the horses, came in for a share of her notice and admiration. A solitary secretary bird, stalking away down in the hollow, became the subject of numerous inquiries, and she gazed with awe upon a cloud of great white vultures soaring overhead bound for some defunct horse or sheep, appearing from nowhere and disappearing as mysteriously. To the English girl, with her keen love of Nature, even these insignificant representatives of wild African animal life were full of interest.

They passed a large ostrich farm lying beneath them on the slope, and she could hardly believe her companion’s statement that the distant black specks at the farther ends of their respective enclosures were as formidable as the traditional mad bull, until a large troop of ten-months-old ostriches, under charge of herds, swept past, and he drew her attention to their size, and the strength of those long legs terminating in a sharp, horny toe, capable of ripping a man up. But the birds looked very handsome, very picturesque as they careered by, their snowy plumes extended and waving, and she was delighted with the picture they made, though her enjoyment was tempered with alarm as the horses showed signs of restiveness. But Claverton reassured her, and the ostriches and their keepers were soon left far behind.

“You live at Seringa Vale, do you not, Mr Claverton?”

“Well, yes; I do at present. I am jackarooing there, as they say in Australia, which is to say that I am imbibing instruction in the craft in consideration of my valuable services.”

“And are you going to settle out here, then?”

“To settle! H’m! How do you know I wasn’t born and bred out here?”

“I suppose because there’s some sort of secret sign by which one importation can detect another,” answered Lilian. “I don’t believe you have been out here as long as I have.”

“Do I look so thoroughly the ‘new chum,’ then? Point out the conspicuous sign of ‘rawness,’ that I may at once eradicate it, if it is worth eradicating, that is.”

“No. I refuse to reveal my masonic sign,” she answered, gaily; “but I know I am right in my conjecture. I could tell the moment I saw you. Am I not right? Now confess!”

“Yes and no. That is to say, it is only three months since I left England this time; but before that I was out here in South Africa for several years.”

“Then I cannot claim seniority of standing, after all. Are there any more ‘importations’ at Seringa Vale?”

“Yes. Hicks. But he’s so thoroughly acclimatised that he don’t count. You and I are exiles and sojourners in a far country. I foresee we shall be talking British ‘shop’ to a grievous extent,” said Claverton, not that he cared a rush about England, or had any great reason to, for the matter of that, but it would establish anententewith his beautiful travelling companion, a something quite between themselves. He was surprised to notice a wearied and even pained expression flit across the lovely face, like the shadow of a cloud passing over the bright smooth surface of a mountain lake.

“I don’t know. I think I would rather forget all about England,” she replied, sadly. “It is a subject with no fascination for me. As I’m here in this country I want to like it, and it is highly probable that I shall, at any rate during the next two months. By-the-bye, what dear old people Mr and Mrs Brathwaite are!”

“That they are,” assented the other, heartily. And then for the life of him he could not help subsiding into silence. She had a history, then. She would fain forget the land of her birth. It was not wholly the stern law of necessity that had banished her to a distant land to fight the rough, hard battle of life. There was another cause, and glancing at her as she sat beside him, Claverton thought he could in a measure guess at the nature of that cause. His pulses were strangely stirred, and even then he was conscious of a longing to comfort her, of a wild, unreasoning resentment against some person unknown. Remarkable, wasn’t it, considering he had only seen her for the first time in his life that morning, and that now it was still far short of midday?

But two persons of opposite sexes, both young, both goodly to look upon, and under circumstances situated such as these two, will, I trow, find it difficult to preserve silence for long—seated side by side in the circumscribed space of a buggy. Lilian was the first to break it.

“What was that?” she asked, eagerly, as a loud resounding bark echoed forth from the hillside above them.

“Only a baboon. Look, there he is—that black speck up there; and the others are not far off.”

They were driving through a wild and narrow pass. High overhead great masses of rock cut the skyline in fantastic piles, castellated here, riven there, and apparently about to crumble in pieces, and hurl themselves down upon the road. Thick bush grew right down to the road winding along the side of the hill, which here and there fell straight away from it in rather an alarming and precipitous manner.

It was just at the most alarming of these places that a few puffs of dust and a crack or two of a whip betokened the approach of waggons, and the next moment the foremost of them appeared round a jutting corner of rock. Claverton muttered an imprecation as he noted that the oxen were without a leader, straggling across the very narrow road at their own sweet will, and bearing down upon him and his charge a great deal faster than he liked. The waggon, loaded sky high with wool bales, was still a couple of hundred yards off, but the road from it to the buggy was a brisk declivity; there seemed very insufficient brake on, and no sign of any one in charge. One of two things was likely to happen: either the buggy would be splintered into matchwood against the inner side of the road, or hurled into perdition over the outer one, by the ponderous mass now bearing down uncontrolled upon it. Claverton reined in his horses and hallooed angrily.

An ugly, mud-coloured head rose from the apex of the pile; then apparently subsided.

“Where’s your ‘leader,’ youschepsel?” he shouted in Dutch. “Get off and stop your fore oxen, or, by God, I’ll shoot them dead on the spot.”

The situation was critical, it must be remembered. A sooty imp of a boy glided to the front of the span, and succeeded in bringing them up just in time. The huge, unwieldy machine rolled creaking past the buggy, narrowly grazing it with the wool bales. The Hottentot driver raised his ugly head and leered insolently.

“Hey, you, Engelschman! Don’t you know how to pass a waggon yet?” he shouted.

Quickly Claverton stood up, and by dint of a dexterous “flick,” cut the fellow with his driving-whip in such wise as to chip a weal of skin out of his face, and then the pace of the passing vehicles carried him out of reach.

The Hottentot yelled and cursed with rage and pain; but there was something so threatening in Claverton’s face and the sudden movement he made as if to descend and make a further example of him that the fellow thought better of it, and dropped the empty grog bottle which he had been about to shy after the trap. He solaced himself, however, with a shower of parting curses.

“Lord, Lord! To think that I should have to sit still and be cheeked by a dirty drunken Tottie,” said Claverton to himself yet aloud, as if oblivious of his companion. Yet he had to. He could hardly drop the reins and leave her there in the middle of an excessively narrow and dangerous bit of road, with a pair of very fresh and somewhat restive horses on hand, while he went to wreak further vengeance on the impudent rascal whose carelessness might have been productive of a serious catastrophe. He was handicapped altogether.

It was an earnest of real life. By himself, with only himself to think of, he could take care of himself. In charge of another, would he not have to swallow tons and tons over and above the traditional peck of “matter in the wrong place” without a murmur? He would be handicapped altogether. Philosopher as he was, it was hardly likely that such a consideration should obtrude at this moment.

The other waggon was engineered by a couple of quiet-looking and civil Kafirs, who gave them plenty of roadway and the good-morning as they passed.

Claverton stole a glance at his companion’s face. She had been not a little startled, he could see that, yet she kept her composure, and the fact pleased him. Most women under the circumstances would have let fly exclamations of alarm, perhaps shrieked, possibly even might have grabbed convulsively at the reins—that most blindly idiotic and utterly exasperating phase of feminine scare upon wheels. This one, however, only changed colour ever so little, but did and said nothing.

“Here we are at an ‘hotel,’ as they call it in this country,” he remarked, pointing out a seedy-looking domicile, like unto a fifth-rate Dutch farmhouse, which hove in sight before them. “We can either stop there, or drive on a little farther and outspan in theveldt, whichever you prefer.”

“Oh, do let us outspan in theveldt,” answered Lilian, gleefully. “The drive is lovely, and a picnic in the middle of it will be quite the right thing.”

“Of course it will—or rather two picnics, for we shall have to outspan again. Look, we don’t lose much by giving that barracoon the go-by,” he went on, as they passed the edifice in question. “Goat chops very tough, pumpkin and rice, and Cape sherry, are about the only items in its bill of fare, I venture to predict.”

“Horrible!” declared Lilian, with a laughing grimace.

They drove on a little farther, and halted in a beautiful spot, by a pool of clear, but brackish water, thickly overhung with bush and trailing plants, where Lilian was delighted with the colony of pendulous finks’ nests swaying to and fro as their startled occupants dashed in and out, chirping volubly. Claverton took the horses to the water, then knee-haltered and allowed them to roll while he placed on the ground one of the couple of bundles of oat-hay which were carried in the buggy for their benefit. Then he returned to his charge.

“I must apologise, Miss Strange. The rule of theveldtis not that of society. Here it is, ‘horses first.’”

He spread the wraps, which kind, thoughtful Mrs Brathwaite had sent for Lilian’s use, under a shady tree, making her a comfortable seat. Then he unearthed the commissariat, of which the staple articles were a chicken and a bottle of Moselle.

“But this is far too luxurious,” protested Lilian, her beautiful face sparkling with animation. She was thoroughly enjoying the unconventionally of the whole thing. “I declare it does not seem like camping in the bush if we are to revel in luxury.”

“Take it easy while you can. That’s the secret of true philosophy. The goat chops and pumpkin and rice will come, all in good time.”

She laughed gaily. Then she threw off her large straw hat, and pushed up her dark hair as if to ease it of the weight. Not a detail of the movement or its effect escaped her companion. He had not yet seen her without her hat. It is surprising what a difference this outdoor appendage makes in the appearance of some women. He noted, without surprise, that Lilian Strange looked equally beautiful either way.

“Mr Claverton, why don’t you smoke?” she asked, as, having lunched, there was a dreamy pause in the conversation.

“I thought you might object. But—how do you know I indulge in the chimney trick?”

“Object? No, I’m not so selfish as that. And as for how I knew, I might answer all men do, but I won’t. The fact is, you made a quite unconscious and mechanical dive at your pocket, and brought out half a pipe. I’ll give you credit that the movewasquite unconscious.”

“It was, upon my honour. What a magician you are—you notice everything.”

It has been stated that Lilian Strange possessed an extraordinarily dangerous and captivating smile. She was in one of her softest moods now, thoroughly enjoying the fresh air and wild, extensive scenery; and the drive, the impromptu picnicà deux, and above all her late emancipation from distasteful drudgery amid uncongenial surroundings, and the prospect of two months’ rest from the same. Then she had taken a great liking to her travelling escort; short as had been the period of their acquaintance. So that now as she lay back, laughing over the quaint dryness of the said escort’s remarks, it could not be but that her winning and attractive spell should weave itself around him to the full. This girl was something quite new in Claverton’s experience. The soft, sweet tones of her voice, her glorious beauty, her very ways and movements, seemed to cast a glamour over him such as he had never known before in the course of his life. Bright, teasing Ethel Brathwaite, blue-eyed, sunny, impulsive, seemed poor clay when contrasted with this new arrival with the lovely, expressive face and the undulating, sensuous form—so stately and yet so unaffected and appreciative—so cold of demeanour, at times, and withal so sweet and considerate. Yet nineteen men out of twenty would have given the preference to Ethel; but then it may be that this other one would have favoured the nineteen with the coldness devoid of the consideration.

Be this as it may, Claverton was certainly the twentieth in both senses, and, as they sat there, resting in the golden sunshine, the drowsy air around them made musical by the whistling of spreuws and the hum of summer insects, he, at any rate, found himself wishing that that hour might last throughout an eternity.

And the curious part of it was that he had not known her for hours enough to make a double figure.

But time cannot be trifled with, and they were due at Seringa Vale before dark. So the horses were put to in a trice.

“Can’t I help you in any way?” said Lilian. “It seems so hard that you should have all the trouble while I sit still and look on.”

“It’s no trouble at all,” answered the other, tugging vigorously at a refractory strap. “I wouldn’t let you bother about this sort of thing for the world. In fact, I am only too glad that you are not tired to death with the long, hot ride. And I think we’ll put the hood up, for there’s no shade between this and the next outspan.”

Now came the hottest stage of the journey. The full glare of the sun focussed down into the broad valley, beat fiercely upon the tent of the buggy, and, but for the rapid movement creating its own draught, there was not a breath of air. Lilian began to feel drowsy and could have pleaded guilty to an incipient headache, but she did not complain. Her companion, however, detected the tired look in her eyes, and was greatly concerned; but she laughed it off. She would be all right again when it got cooler, she said. It was really very silly of her, but she was just a trifle below par.

On this point he rather vehemently reassured her. Why, he himself often felt as if about to get a sunstroke riding through these long, hot valleys, just in the middle of the day—and he was a tolerably well-seasoned traveller. But it is to be feared that, for once in his life, he forgot to spare the horses in his anxiety to reach the end of that stage.

Lilian, however, forgot her fatigue, as after the next outspan they wended up the rugged, but picturesque bush-road, in the golden light of the waning afternoon. They were in shade for the most part now, and the air grew cooler as they ascended gradually out of the stifling valley, where the river they had crossed a little while ago, flowed sparkling in the sun like a silver thread. Opposite, a row of stiff euphorbia reared their plumed heads, their stems, straight and regular as a line of organ-pipes, standing out from the darksome, rocky glen behind them like the bars of a gloomy cage enclosing some ferocious beast. There, a great cliff, overhung with lichens and monkey ropes, starting capriciously from among the greenness, and everywhere a shining sea of bush; not silent, either, but resounding with evidence of animal and insect life. Far away, almost inaudible, the harsh bark of the sentinel baboon; close at hand, oppressive in its vociferation, the shrill chirrup of crickets. Hoopoes were softly calling to each other from the tangled recesses of some cool and shady nook; and a bright louri, in all the pride of his crimson wings and glossy plumage, darted across the road.

When they arrived at Seringa Vale, all its inmates were at the door to welcome Lilian.

“I hope Arthur took great care of you, my dear,” said Mrs Brathwaite, the first genial greetings over.

“I have to thank Mr Claverton for taking the greatest possible care of me,” answered Lilian, flashing at him one of her sweetest smiles.

For a brief second their eyes met. One standing there noted both those glances and read them like an open book—read in one, possibility; in the other, certainty. And Ethel was forced to admit that her aunt’s description of their visitor’s attractions was not one whit exaggerated.

And it had all come about in a single day.

Volume One—Chapter Fifteen.In a Single Day.“Mopela, what on earth have you been doing all this time? I sent you for that water half an hour ago.”There is menace as well as wrath in the tones of the speaker as he confronts the individual addressed, who is calmly squatting on the ground between two pails containing water just drawn out of the dam. It is midday, and a blazing sun pours down upon them, to the delectation of certain mud turtles basking on the hard, cracked surface of the baked ooze, and who, alarmed by the sound of angry voices, scuttle away into the water as fast as their legs can carry them; while, in the noontide stillness, the smooth surface of the reservoir glows like copper beneath the burnished rays. Again Claverton—for it is he—repeats his question in a more irate tone than before.Mopela rises and eyes his interlocutor in a manner that betokens mischief. He is a huge Kafir, tall and broad-shouldered, and his bronze, sinewy frame, whose nudity shows the development of great muscular power, looks formidable enough. He hates Claverton, who has more than once had occasion to be “down on” him for careless herding, or other derelictions, and never loses an opportunity, whether by covert insolence or neglect of orders, of showing it. And for some time past the relations between the two have been—in the language of diplomacy—a trifle “strained.”“Ihaven’tbeen half an hour,” he replies, defiantly, “I only stopped a minute to light my pipe.”“You infernal blackguard, do you mean to give me the lie direct?” says Claverton; and his voice shakes with pent-up fury as he advances a pace nearer the last speaker. “Take up those buckets and get away at once!”The savage gives an exclamation of disgust, and his eyes glare. Then throwing back his head contemptuously, he says with an insolent sneer: “You are notBaashere.”“The devil I’m not!” Crack!—woof!—a right and left-hander straight from the shoulder, and the huge barbarian goes down like a ninepin. “You dog! you’ve played the fool with me long enough, and now you’ve come to the end of your tether. Get up,” he continues, spurning with his foot the prostrate man, from whose mouth and nostrils a red torrent is gushing. “Get up, and I’ll floor you again!” His fierce temper is now completely beyond his control, and for the moment he is as thoroughly a savage as the dusky giant lying at his feet.How it will end Heaven only knows, but at this juncture a low cry of horror behind him causes him to turn, and what he sees brings a hot flush to his face, up till now livid with rage. For there stands Lilian Strange, and her white face and dilated eyes betray that she has been a terrified witness of the whole scene.Claverton started as if he had been shot.“I fear you have been dreadfully frightened,” he said. “Needless to explain I had no idea of your presence.”He felt very concerned, and his face flushed hotly again as he thought what an awful ruffian he must seem in her eyes. This was the second time within twenty-four hours that she had seen him lose his temper, though yesterday, anxiety for her own safety had been the justification. His clothes were plentifully splashed with sulphur and lime, in which salutary decoction he had been dipping sheep when thefracasoccurred. At his feet lay the hulking form of the Kafir, breathing stertorously and bleeding like a pig. Yes, what a cut-throat he must seem to her!But Lilian could not have been of this opinion, for the startled expression faded from her eyes and a delicate tinge showed in the warm paleness of her cheek.“I had been for a walk in the garden, and came suddenly upon you. I couldn’t help seeing it all. He seems badly hurt; can’t we do anything for him?” she pursued, going up to look at the prostrate barbarian, and again growing pale at the sight of the blood. For Mopela lying there, with all the results on his countenance of the punishment he had received, was not an exhilarating object to gaze upon.“Do anything for him? Oh, no; he’s all right. Look.”The Kafir opened his eyes stupidly and staggered to his feet. Then, with a glance of deadly hatred at his chastiser, he took up the buckets and walked away, his gait rolling and uneven.“You don’t know what I’ve had to put up with from that bru—that rascal for some time past. Well, he’s got it now, at all events. I knew it was only a question of time. The only thing I regret is that it should have been at so inopportune a time,” he added, in tones of deep concern. He was exceedingly vexed and disgusted with himself. Mopela might have inflicted upon him a whole vocabulary of impudence before he would have afforded Lilian such an exhibition had he but foreseen.“I suppose you find these natives very trying?” she said.“Not as a rule. On the contrary, I always pull well enough with them. But that chap’s defiance had reached such a point that one of us had to knuckle under. It would never have done for that one to have been myself.”“I suppose not,” answered Lilian, with a little smile at the idea of her escort of yesterday “knuckling under” to anybody. “And now I must not delay you. I see you are busy—but—would you mind walking back to the house with me? I am easily frightened, and these savages do look so dreadful when they are angry.”“Would I mind? But don’tyoumind being seen in such ragged company?” he added, drily, with a glance at his rough and besplashed attire.“In Bond Street it is just possible that I should. On an African sheep farm the escort is appropriate,” she answered, with a flash of merriment in her lovely, changing eyes.The distance to the house was not great, but Claverton contrived to render it as great as possible.“How is it you are out all alone?” he asked, as they walked along.“Oh, the fact is, Mrs Brathwaite and the girls were busy, very busy. I wouldn’t for the world abuse my guest’s privilege, so I slipped off on a solitary voyage of discovery.”“And a pretty sort of discovery you made! By-the-bye, I have had no opportunity of asking if you had quite recovered from yesterday’s fatigue, and it has been lying heavily on my conscience. You did not appear at breakfast, and we have been desperately busy all the morning.”There was a tender ring in his tones as he made this very commonplace observation which could hardly have escaped the other. She answered very sweetly:“I am afraid I was dreadfully lazy. But I was a little tired this morning. It shan’t occur again; there!”“You must rest to-day, then, because they are getting up a dance to-night in your honour. You are literally to make yourdébuthere. Didn’t they tell you?”“Now I think of it, they did. Here we are at the house, Mr Claverton. Thanks, so much, for accompanying me.”“And now I shall catch it. The dear old man hates any of us to thrash a nigger. Stand by and support me under my castigation.”Claverton had seen Mr Brathwaite in the hall, and lost no time in telling him what had happened. The old settler shook his head as he listened.“It won’t do,” he said. “You’ll never get any good out of them if you take to hammering them. They cut off to the district town and lay an information against you, and you’re summoned before the magistrate, and put to no end of bother. And that’s not all. It has a bad effect on the others. They know they’ll get the better of you in court, and invariably do get it; and once a black fellow thinks he can get the better of you in any way, then good-bye to your authority. Besides, it earns you a bad name among the Kafirs, which means a constant difficulty in obtaining labour, and when you do obtain it you only get the refuse. There’s Thorman, for instance. He used to lick his Kafirs for the least thing, and he never kept a decent servant on his place two months at a time. I advised him to knock off that plan, and he did; but for years afterwards he suffered from its effects, in the shape of a constant lack of decent labour. No; it doesn’t pay, take my word for it.”“Well, but you’ve no idea how cheeky that fellow was, and has been for some time past,” urged Claverton.The other merely shrugged his shoulders with the air of a man unconvinced, and repeated as he turned away: “It doesn’t do.”Claverton shot a glance at his late companion as much as to say; “There, I told you how it would be,” and caught a bright, rapid smile in return. Then he went back to his work.Hard by the scene of the recent row was the dipping tank, oblong in shape, fifteen feet by five and about eight in depth. It was two-thirds full of a decoction of lime and sulphur, and into this the sheep were dropped, and after swimming about for a couple of minutes or so were suffered to emerge, by the raising of a sliding door at one end. This end, unlike the other, was not perpendicular, but the floor was on a sufficient slope to enable the animals to walk out, which they did, and stood dripping in a stone-paved enclosure also with a shelving floor so that the liquid that drained off them should run back into the tank. At the other end was a larger enclosure containing several hundred sheep, which four or five Kafirs, among them the recreant Mopela, were busy catching for the purpose of dipping them in the unsavoury but scab-eradicating mixture. Over which operation presided Hicks and Claverton, each with a forked pole in his hand, wherewith to administer the necessary ducking to the immersed quadrupeds. At last Hicks proposed that they should knock off, and come back and finish after dinner.“Not worth while, is it?” was the reply. “Let’s finish off now we’re at it, then we can take things easy, clothed and in our right minds. We can hardly go inside the house, even, in this beastly mess.”Claverton carries his point, as he generally does. So they work on and on in the heat and the dust, and the air is full of splashes as the kicking animals are dropped into the tank, and redolent with the ill savour of sulphur and lime and perspiring natives; and the contents of one of the great cauldrons simmering over the fire are thrown in to replenish the medicinal bath, and the number of sheep left undipped waxes smaller and beautifully less, till at length the last half-dozen are disposed of and the job is at an end.Then Hicks suggested a swim in the dam, and the proposal was soon carried into effect. After which, in renewed attire and presentable once more, they appeared among the rest of the household.To some at least in that household has come among them a change; an element of upheaval certainly not even dreamed of by all whom it shall concern. A change. The acquisition of a beautiful and agreeable young lady visitor by this circle? No, something more than that.Mrs Brathwaite playfully upbraided Claverton for being the unconscious cause of frightening her visitor on the first morning of her arrival. Then Lilian came to the rescue. If she had been startled it was her own fault or ill fortune for going where she was not wanted. Here vehement protest from him whose cause she was pleading. Then, she urged, he who had been the means of startling her had made all the amends in his power by seeing her safely home, coward as she was to need it. Here more vehement protest.What does this vehemence mean on the part of a man to whose nature it is wholly foreign, who is calmness and equability itself?This question—partly its own answer—flashed through Ethel’s mind. She was to all appearances deep in discussion with Laura and Hicks as to certain debatable arrangements for the coming festivity. In reality she was performing that extremely difficult feat, keeping an ear for two distinct conversations. In the course of which difficult feat Ethel was wondering how it was that these adventuresses (yes, that is the word she used) with nothing on earth to recommend them, should have the power of taking everybody by storm in the way their visitor seemed to be doing.Lilian was wondering how it was that her visit seemed likely to be far more pleasant and enjoyable than she had at first anticipated, which was saying a great deal. Also what there was about this man, now talking so unconcernedly to herself and her hostess, that raised him on a pedestal considerably above the residue of the species.Claverton was wondering how it was, that his life seemed to have been cut in two distinct halves since yesterday.And Ethel again read both faces like an open book. And this time she read in the one, greater possibility; in the other, absolute certainty. Such was the situation.And it had all come about in a single day.

“Mopela, what on earth have you been doing all this time? I sent you for that water half an hour ago.”

There is menace as well as wrath in the tones of the speaker as he confronts the individual addressed, who is calmly squatting on the ground between two pails containing water just drawn out of the dam. It is midday, and a blazing sun pours down upon them, to the delectation of certain mud turtles basking on the hard, cracked surface of the baked ooze, and who, alarmed by the sound of angry voices, scuttle away into the water as fast as their legs can carry them; while, in the noontide stillness, the smooth surface of the reservoir glows like copper beneath the burnished rays. Again Claverton—for it is he—repeats his question in a more irate tone than before.

Mopela rises and eyes his interlocutor in a manner that betokens mischief. He is a huge Kafir, tall and broad-shouldered, and his bronze, sinewy frame, whose nudity shows the development of great muscular power, looks formidable enough. He hates Claverton, who has more than once had occasion to be “down on” him for careless herding, or other derelictions, and never loses an opportunity, whether by covert insolence or neglect of orders, of showing it. And for some time past the relations between the two have been—in the language of diplomacy—a trifle “strained.”

“Ihaven’tbeen half an hour,” he replies, defiantly, “I only stopped a minute to light my pipe.”

“You infernal blackguard, do you mean to give me the lie direct?” says Claverton; and his voice shakes with pent-up fury as he advances a pace nearer the last speaker. “Take up those buckets and get away at once!”

The savage gives an exclamation of disgust, and his eyes glare. Then throwing back his head contemptuously, he says with an insolent sneer: “You are notBaashere.”

“The devil I’m not!” Crack!—woof!—a right and left-hander straight from the shoulder, and the huge barbarian goes down like a ninepin. “You dog! you’ve played the fool with me long enough, and now you’ve come to the end of your tether. Get up,” he continues, spurning with his foot the prostrate man, from whose mouth and nostrils a red torrent is gushing. “Get up, and I’ll floor you again!” His fierce temper is now completely beyond his control, and for the moment he is as thoroughly a savage as the dusky giant lying at his feet.

How it will end Heaven only knows, but at this juncture a low cry of horror behind him causes him to turn, and what he sees brings a hot flush to his face, up till now livid with rage. For there stands Lilian Strange, and her white face and dilated eyes betray that she has been a terrified witness of the whole scene.

Claverton started as if he had been shot.

“I fear you have been dreadfully frightened,” he said. “Needless to explain I had no idea of your presence.”

He felt very concerned, and his face flushed hotly again as he thought what an awful ruffian he must seem in her eyes. This was the second time within twenty-four hours that she had seen him lose his temper, though yesterday, anxiety for her own safety had been the justification. His clothes were plentifully splashed with sulphur and lime, in which salutary decoction he had been dipping sheep when thefracasoccurred. At his feet lay the hulking form of the Kafir, breathing stertorously and bleeding like a pig. Yes, what a cut-throat he must seem to her!

But Lilian could not have been of this opinion, for the startled expression faded from her eyes and a delicate tinge showed in the warm paleness of her cheek.

“I had been for a walk in the garden, and came suddenly upon you. I couldn’t help seeing it all. He seems badly hurt; can’t we do anything for him?” she pursued, going up to look at the prostrate barbarian, and again growing pale at the sight of the blood. For Mopela lying there, with all the results on his countenance of the punishment he had received, was not an exhilarating object to gaze upon.

“Do anything for him? Oh, no; he’s all right. Look.”

The Kafir opened his eyes stupidly and staggered to his feet. Then, with a glance of deadly hatred at his chastiser, he took up the buckets and walked away, his gait rolling and uneven.

“You don’t know what I’ve had to put up with from that bru—that rascal for some time past. Well, he’s got it now, at all events. I knew it was only a question of time. The only thing I regret is that it should have been at so inopportune a time,” he added, in tones of deep concern. He was exceedingly vexed and disgusted with himself. Mopela might have inflicted upon him a whole vocabulary of impudence before he would have afforded Lilian such an exhibition had he but foreseen.

“I suppose you find these natives very trying?” she said.

“Not as a rule. On the contrary, I always pull well enough with them. But that chap’s defiance had reached such a point that one of us had to knuckle under. It would never have done for that one to have been myself.”

“I suppose not,” answered Lilian, with a little smile at the idea of her escort of yesterday “knuckling under” to anybody. “And now I must not delay you. I see you are busy—but—would you mind walking back to the house with me? I am easily frightened, and these savages do look so dreadful when they are angry.”

“Would I mind? But don’tyoumind being seen in such ragged company?” he added, drily, with a glance at his rough and besplashed attire.

“In Bond Street it is just possible that I should. On an African sheep farm the escort is appropriate,” she answered, with a flash of merriment in her lovely, changing eyes.

The distance to the house was not great, but Claverton contrived to render it as great as possible.

“How is it you are out all alone?” he asked, as they walked along.

“Oh, the fact is, Mrs Brathwaite and the girls were busy, very busy. I wouldn’t for the world abuse my guest’s privilege, so I slipped off on a solitary voyage of discovery.”

“And a pretty sort of discovery you made! By-the-bye, I have had no opportunity of asking if you had quite recovered from yesterday’s fatigue, and it has been lying heavily on my conscience. You did not appear at breakfast, and we have been desperately busy all the morning.”

There was a tender ring in his tones as he made this very commonplace observation which could hardly have escaped the other. She answered very sweetly:

“I am afraid I was dreadfully lazy. But I was a little tired this morning. It shan’t occur again; there!”

“You must rest to-day, then, because they are getting up a dance to-night in your honour. You are literally to make yourdébuthere. Didn’t they tell you?”

“Now I think of it, they did. Here we are at the house, Mr Claverton. Thanks, so much, for accompanying me.”

“And now I shall catch it. The dear old man hates any of us to thrash a nigger. Stand by and support me under my castigation.”

Claverton had seen Mr Brathwaite in the hall, and lost no time in telling him what had happened. The old settler shook his head as he listened.

“It won’t do,” he said. “You’ll never get any good out of them if you take to hammering them. They cut off to the district town and lay an information against you, and you’re summoned before the magistrate, and put to no end of bother. And that’s not all. It has a bad effect on the others. They know they’ll get the better of you in court, and invariably do get it; and once a black fellow thinks he can get the better of you in any way, then good-bye to your authority. Besides, it earns you a bad name among the Kafirs, which means a constant difficulty in obtaining labour, and when you do obtain it you only get the refuse. There’s Thorman, for instance. He used to lick his Kafirs for the least thing, and he never kept a decent servant on his place two months at a time. I advised him to knock off that plan, and he did; but for years afterwards he suffered from its effects, in the shape of a constant lack of decent labour. No; it doesn’t pay, take my word for it.”

“Well, but you’ve no idea how cheeky that fellow was, and has been for some time past,” urged Claverton.

The other merely shrugged his shoulders with the air of a man unconvinced, and repeated as he turned away: “It doesn’t do.”

Claverton shot a glance at his late companion as much as to say; “There, I told you how it would be,” and caught a bright, rapid smile in return. Then he went back to his work.

Hard by the scene of the recent row was the dipping tank, oblong in shape, fifteen feet by five and about eight in depth. It was two-thirds full of a decoction of lime and sulphur, and into this the sheep were dropped, and after swimming about for a couple of minutes or so were suffered to emerge, by the raising of a sliding door at one end. This end, unlike the other, was not perpendicular, but the floor was on a sufficient slope to enable the animals to walk out, which they did, and stood dripping in a stone-paved enclosure also with a shelving floor so that the liquid that drained off them should run back into the tank. At the other end was a larger enclosure containing several hundred sheep, which four or five Kafirs, among them the recreant Mopela, were busy catching for the purpose of dipping them in the unsavoury but scab-eradicating mixture. Over which operation presided Hicks and Claverton, each with a forked pole in his hand, wherewith to administer the necessary ducking to the immersed quadrupeds. At last Hicks proposed that they should knock off, and come back and finish after dinner.

“Not worth while, is it?” was the reply. “Let’s finish off now we’re at it, then we can take things easy, clothed and in our right minds. We can hardly go inside the house, even, in this beastly mess.”

Claverton carries his point, as he generally does. So they work on and on in the heat and the dust, and the air is full of splashes as the kicking animals are dropped into the tank, and redolent with the ill savour of sulphur and lime and perspiring natives; and the contents of one of the great cauldrons simmering over the fire are thrown in to replenish the medicinal bath, and the number of sheep left undipped waxes smaller and beautifully less, till at length the last half-dozen are disposed of and the job is at an end.

Then Hicks suggested a swim in the dam, and the proposal was soon carried into effect. After which, in renewed attire and presentable once more, they appeared among the rest of the household.

To some at least in that household has come among them a change; an element of upheaval certainly not even dreamed of by all whom it shall concern. A change. The acquisition of a beautiful and agreeable young lady visitor by this circle? No, something more than that.

Mrs Brathwaite playfully upbraided Claverton for being the unconscious cause of frightening her visitor on the first morning of her arrival. Then Lilian came to the rescue. If she had been startled it was her own fault or ill fortune for going where she was not wanted. Here vehement protest from him whose cause she was pleading. Then, she urged, he who had been the means of startling her had made all the amends in his power by seeing her safely home, coward as she was to need it. Here more vehement protest.

What does this vehemence mean on the part of a man to whose nature it is wholly foreign, who is calmness and equability itself?

This question—partly its own answer—flashed through Ethel’s mind. She was to all appearances deep in discussion with Laura and Hicks as to certain debatable arrangements for the coming festivity. In reality she was performing that extremely difficult feat, keeping an ear for two distinct conversations. In the course of which difficult feat Ethel was wondering how it was that these adventuresses (yes, that is the word she used) with nothing on earth to recommend them, should have the power of taking everybody by storm in the way their visitor seemed to be doing.

Lilian was wondering how it was that her visit seemed likely to be far more pleasant and enjoyable than she had at first anticipated, which was saying a great deal. Also what there was about this man, now talking so unconcernedly to herself and her hostess, that raised him on a pedestal considerably above the residue of the species.

Claverton was wondering how it was, that his life seemed to have been cut in two distinct halves since yesterday.

And Ethel again read both faces like an open book. And this time she read in the one, greater possibility; in the other, absolute certainty. Such was the situation.

And it had all come about in a single day.

Volume One—Chapter Sixteen.“Mingle Shades of Joy and Woe.”The long dining-room is in a blaze of light, such as it has not sparkled with for some considerable time, and only then on rare and special occasions such as the present one. The polished floor reflects the glow of numerous candles, and, as Hicks vigorously puts it, the decks are thoroughly cleared for action. Expectant groups stand about the room or throng the doorways—for the fun has not yet commenced, and meanwhile talk and laughter goes on among the jovial spirits there foregathered, and the graver ones, when not the subjects of rally, are intent on contemplating the floor, the ceiling, the fireplace, or anything or nothing. The party might be an English one to all appearances. You may descry the usual phases in its ingredients. There is shy humanity, confident humanity, blatant humanity, fussy humanity, even pompous humanity. There, however, the resemblance ends. Of stiffness there is none. Everybody knows everybody, or soon will—meanwhile acts as if it does. Then, in the little matter of attire, many of the “lords of creation” are arrayed in orthodox evening costume and white-chokered, others in black coats of the “go-to-meeting” order, while three or four Dutchmen, bidden to the festivity on neighbourly grounds, sport raiment fearfully and wonderfully made, whose effect is enhanced by terrific neckties, varying in shades from scarlet to green. The company is composed almost entirely of the settler class. Jolly old fellows who have come to look on at the enjoyment of their extensive and well-looking families in various stages of adolescence, and who, in spite of their white hair and sixty or seventy summers, seem more than half inclined not to remain passive spectators of the fun. One or two of these, by the way, judging from nasal rubicundity and other signs, will, I trow, be found more frequently hovering around the charmed circle where flows the genial dram, than in the immediate neighbourhood of the giddy rout. Middle-aged men, bronzed and bearded, looking serious as they contemplate what is expected of them, for assuredly we English, in whatever part of the world we be, “take our pleasures sadly.” Young settlers are there, stalwart fellows, several of whom have ridden from far, carrying their gala array in a saddle-bag, and who by the time they return will have been three days away from home. But distance is nothing; their horses are strong and hardy, and the roads are good, and if not, what matters? Life is nothing without its enjoyments, and accordingly they intend to enjoy themselves, and do.Of the fair sex there is a goodly muster—though fewer in proportion to that of the men, as is frequently the case at frontier dances—consisting of the wives and daughters of the settlers. Some are pretty, some plain; some are bright and lively, and nicely dressed; others again are badly attired, and neither bright nor lively; and at present they are mostly gathered together in the room opening out of the one which is to be the scene of the fray.“Now then, Hicks, Armitage, some of you fellows, let’s set the ball rolling,” cried the jovial voice of Jim Brathwaite, as a volunteer pianist (the orchestral department must be worked entirely by volunteer agency) sat down at the instrument and dashed off a lively galop. “Come along, Arthur, give these fellows a lead,” he went on.Claverton was standing in the doorway. He turned as Jim addressed him. “Well, if it’s all the same, I think I’ll cut in later. Fact is, I’m not much of a dancer. Besides, it’s a ridiculous exercise.”“Aren’t you! ‘England expects,’” said Ethel, maliciously, as she floated by, a dream-like vision in pink gauziness. Her golden hair, confined by some cunning device at the back of her head, flowed in shining ripples below her waist, and the deep blue eyes flashed laughingly into his as she made her mocking rejoinder.“Does it? Expectations are notoriously unsafe assets,” was the quiet reply.“Well, we must make a start or we shall never get these fellows to begin,” said Jim. “Come along, Ethel, you promised me the first dance. If you didn’t you ought to have.”They glided off, and Claverton stood and followed them mechanically with his glance; but, as a matter of fact, he hardly saw them. He was wondering what on earth had become of Lilian Strange. The dance wore on, and then the next, still Claverton stood in the doorway, which coign of vantage he held conjointly with an uncouth-looking Dutchman and a burly but bashful compatriot, and stillshedid not appear. At length, while crossing the inner room with a vague idea of putting an artless and roundabout inquiry or two to Mrs Brathwaite as to why Lilian did not appear, he heard himself hailed by his host. Turning quickly he perceived the latter sitting in confab with a contemporary in age, but vastly different in appearance.“Arthur, this is an old friend of mine, Mr Garrett.”Then arose a queer-looking old fellow, short, rotund of person, and whose exceeding rubicundity of visage betokened, I fear, anything but aversion for ardent spirits. Running one stubby hand through his bristly grey hair, he extended the other to Claverton.“’Ow do—’ow do? Not been long in the country, have you? My word, but it’s a fine country, this is—fine country for young fellers like you.”Claverton thought the country contained also some advantages for the speaker; and he was right. Here was old Joe Garrett, who never knew his father, if he had one, and who, having early in the century deserted from a two-hundred-ton merchant brig lying in Algoa Bay, had started in colonial life as a journeyman carpenter. By hook or by crook he had made his way, and now, by virtue of the four fine farms which he owned, he deemed himself very much of a landed proprietor, and every whit the equal of Walter Brathwaite, “whose ancestors wore chain-armour in the fourteenth century,” as some one or other’s definition of a gentleman runs.“I was jest such a young feller as you once,” went on this embodiment of colonial progress. “I landed in this country in nothin’ but the clothes to my back, and look at me now. Now, I’ll tell you what I did,” and the oracle, slapping one finger into the palm of the of her hand, looked up into his victim’s face with would-be impressive gravity, “I worked; that’s what I did—I worked. Now, you may depend upon it, that for a young feller there’s nothin’ like a noo country—and work!”“I suppose so,” acquiesced Claverton, horribly sick of this biography.“Now a noo country,” went on the oracle, “a noo country, sez I, ain’t an old one. ’Ere you’re free; there,” flinging out a stubby hand in the imaginary direction of Great Britain, “nothing but forms and sticklin’. Now, ’ere I can sit down to dinner without putting on a swallow-tail-coat and a white choker, for instance. No; give me a noo country and freedom, sez I.”“Quite right, Mr Garrett. A swallow-tailed coat plays the mischief with the digestion, and science has discovered that a white choker tarnishes the silver. Something in the starch, you know—arsenic, they say.”“No! You don’t say so now?” returned the other, open-mouthed, and not detecting the fine irony of his banterer’s tone.“Yes, of course. And now excuse me. I must go and find my partner.”“Certainly—certainly. You young fellers! I was a young feller once, ha, ha, ha!” And old Garrett winked, and contorted his visage in the direction of his recent interlocutor in such wise as should mean volumes.“This is ours, Miss Strange.”Lilian had just come in. She had passed close behind the speaker while he was talking to old Garrett, and her entrance did not remain long undiscovered.“Do you know, I had quite begun to fear you were not going to appear to-night—that you were tired or unwell,” he said, as they made their way to the dancing-room.“Bight and wrong. I was tired, and so rested instead of dressing earlier. Now I am all right again, and never felt so well in my life.”“Nor looked it.”It slipped out. The slightest possible flush came into Lilian’s face.“You must not pay me compliments, Mr Claverton,” she said, gravely, but with a smile lurking in her eyes. “They are what you men call ‘bad form.’”“But consider the provocation.”“Again? What am I to do to you? I know. I shall scold you. This is the second time to-day that you have reproached me for being late. This morning and now.”Certesthe provocation was excessive. She was looking surpassingly beautiful this evening, in creamy white, with a velvety rose of deepest crimson on her breast; another bud, a white one, nestling among the thick coils of her bronze-tinted dark hair. Many a glance of astonished admiration greeted her entrance, and followed her about the room; but the quiet repose of the lovely face was devoid of the least sign of self-consciousness.“By Jove!” remarked Armitage to his partner, a chubby little “bunch” with big blue eyes and a button mouth. “Claverton’s a sly dog.That’swhy he was in no hurry to begin. Oho, I see now.”“Sheispretty. How well they look together!” was the reply, as the two stood against the wall to watch them.Ethel, whirling by with the Civil Commissioner’s clerk, caught the last remark. She would have given much to have been able to box poor little Gertie Wray’s ears severely, then and there. That young lady babbled on, utterly void of offence.“I say, though,” said her partner. “She cut you out. Claverton was just on his way to ask you when she came in. He was, really.”“Was he? Then he should have asked me before. My programme’s full now.”Meanwhile let us follow the pair under discussion.“Who was that poor old man you were chaffing so, just now?” Lilian was saying.“Only a curious specimen of natural history. But how do you know I was chaffing anybody?”“Because I heard you. Who is he?”“What perception you have got! ‘He’ is old Garrett, hight Joe, who migrated hither in the year one, to escape the terrible evil of having to dress for dinner.”Lilian could not speak for laughing.“Fact, really; he’s just been telling me all about it. Bother! This dance is at an end. We are down for some more together, though.”“Too many.”“I claim priority of right. I claim your sympathy as a fellow sojourner in a far country. I appeal to your compassion to rescue me from standing out in the cold, in that you are the only one with whom I can gravitate round this festal room without peril to my neighbours’ elbows and shins, and they know it, and shunt me accordingly.”“I don’t believe a word of it,” laughed Lilian. “It is you who shunt them.”“No, I am telling you solemn truth. And now have I not made it clear to you that it is your bounden duty to take pity on me and help the proverbial lame dog over the ditto stile?”“Well then, I’ll see what I can do for you. Now find me a seat—there, thank you—and go and ‘victimise’ some one else,” she added, flashing up at him a bright, mischievous glance.“Not yet. Have pity on—the public elbow and shin. I want to rest, too, after discharging my recent heavy responsibility without disaster;” and he made a move towards the seat beside her.“No. You are not to shirk your duty. Go and do as I wish, or I shall consider it my duty to lose my programme. That means a new one, blank, and then memory is not a trustworthy guide.” And as at that moment some one came up to ask her for a dance, Claverton was constrained unwillingly to obey, or rather, partially to obey, for he fell back on his old position in the convenient doorway, whence his eyes followed her round and round the room, to the complete exclusion of the other score of revolving couples.“Mr Claverton, do prove a friend in need, and save me from the clutches of that awful Dutchman bearing down upon me from over there,” said a flurried, but familiar voice at his elbow. “I promised him in a weak moment, and now he’s coming. Say you’ve got me down for this, and persuade him it’s his mistake. Quick! here he comes.”“All right. But you told me once you’d rather go round with a chair, you know, than with me.”“Did I? Never mind; don’t be mean and rake up things,” replied Ethel, and away they went, while the defrauded Boer, thinking his own sluggish brain was at fault in the reckoning, adjourned to a certain corner of the other room in order to solace his wounded feelings with asopje(dram).“How about England’s disappointment?” said Ethel, maliciously, during a pause.“That affliction has been indefinitely averted. By the way, I never thought to see Allen so screwed.”“Er—I’m not screwed,” mildly objected that long-suffering youth, who had pulled up with a swaying jerk alongside of them.“Aren’t you? My good fellow, a man who is capable of mistaking my substantial and visible means of support for this exceedingly well-polished floor, must be in a critical condition.”“Oh—ah—er—was that you I trod upon? I didn’t know—I’m awfully sorry.”Half-a-dozen bystanders exploded at this, and the dance over, Claverton began to think he had done a considerable share of duty, and sought an opportunity of claiming an instalment of the promised reward; but his turn had not yet come. Presently he overheard a girl near him say:“What do you think of that Miss Strange?”He recognised in the speaker one Jessie Garrett, a daughter of Joe of that ilk.“Well, she’s very pretty, there’s no doubt about that,” answered her partner, a stalwart young ostrich-farmer from the Graaff Reinet district.“Should you admire her as much as Ethel Brathwaite?”“No; I don’t think she’s a patch on Miss Brathwaite; but there’s something awfully fetching about her, for all that.”“Well, there’s no accounting for tastes. I think she’s too colourless—washed-out looking,”—a fault the speaker herself could in no wise plead guilty to. She was a pretty girl herself, in the florid, barmaid style, but as different a creature to Lilian Strange as a plump dabchick to an Arctic tern.Claverton’s lips curled as he looked from the offending couple to the object of their remarks.Sheto be discussed according to the clod-hopping ideas of louts and scullery-maids. He turned away disgusted. Suddenly he heard himself hailed in loud and jovial tones, and, looking up, found himself in the vicinity of the refreshment table, where three or four ancient settlers were exchanging reminiscences, and occasionally clinking glasses. Prominent among them was old Garrett, his rubicund visage now nearly purple.“I sh-shay, C-Claveringsh!” called out this worthy. “C-come and have a what-sh-may call a eye-opener—hic!”“All right.”“Thas righ’sh. Told yer ’ee ain’t proud,” cried the old fellow, beaming triumphantly on the rest, and attempting to bestow upon Claverton a friendly slap on the back, which the latter quietly evaded. He contemplated the individual before him with vast amusement, and speculated as to how soon this worthy’s early retirement would become imperative.The rout went on, and presently Naylor and his violin were pressed into the service to second the piano. In the passage outside a number of the Hottentot servants, emulative of their betters, had got up a dance of their own and waxed merry, and laughed and chattered exceedingly, till at last Jim Brathwaite, hearing the row, sallied forth and cleared them all out summarily.The hours wear on apace. In the silence of the garden the air is fragrant with the cool breaths of night distilling from the myrtle and the flowering pomegranate. High in the heavens hangs a gold half-moon whose lustre pierces a leafy canopy, scattering a network of filmy light upon the shaded earth. In and out of the gloomy shadows of the orange trees a firefly or two trails in mid air a floating spark. All is rest. Now and again a burst of voices and music is borne from the house, yet here it penetrates but feebly, and Night—silver, moon-pierced, star-studded Night—is queen amid the mysterious silence of her witching court.Two figures wandering down the orange walk in the alternate light, and gloom, and dimness. Listen! That low, melodious voice can belong to no other than Lilian Strange.“I am so glad we came out here for a little. I had no idea there could be such a night as this except in books.”“Perhaps it strikes you the more, contrasted with the row and junketing indoors,” said her companion.“No. In any case it would be delicious. And yet there is something of awe about a night like this—don’t laugh at me—it always seems a mysterious shadow-land connecting us with another world.”“Laugh at you! Why won’t you give me credit for a capability of entering into any of your ideas?”“But I do. You are more capable of it than any one I know. There.”“Thanks for that, anyway.”“Don’t stop my rhapsodies, but listen. Doesn’t it seem—standing here in this stillness—as if the world lay far beneath one’s feet; that all the littlenesses and prosaic worries of every-day life could not enter such an enchanted realm? Ah-h!”She uttered a little cry and instinctively drew closer to him as the sudden, yelping bark of a jackal sounded from the bush apparently within fifty yards of them, but really much further off, the stillness and a slight echo adding loudness to the unlooked-for and ill-sounding “bay.”“Don’t be afraid,” he said, reassuringly. “It’s only a jackal. What would you have done if it had been a wolf?”“I should have been dreadfully frightened. What a coward I am!”“At any rate, this time I am not the author of the scare, which is subject-matter for gratulation,” he said.She laughed. “No; but the interruption came in most opportunely, in time to stay my flights. Here am I, inveighing against, and thinking to rise superior to the prosaic commonplaces of life, when a sound, a mere sound, fills me with an overwhelming impulse to rush headlong back into the despised prose. What a step from the sublime to the ridiculous!”“I was thinking something of the kind,” replied Claverton, with a half smile; and his voice grew very soft as he looked at her sweet, serious face. “But don’t be in the least afraid. A jackal is about as formidable or aggressive as a tabby cat, though he does make a diabolical row; and as for wolves, they are very scarce, and even more cowardly; and a yet bolder animal would flee from two such unwonted apparitions in the South African bush,” he added, with a laugh, as he glanced at the regulation “evening-dress” of his companion and himself. “Come this way.”He opened a small gate in the high quince hedge, and they passed out into a narrow bush path which, wound along through thespekboemand feathery mimosa.“Don’t be in the very least afraid,” he repeated, as they wandered on. “I want you thoroughly to appreciate and enjoy about the most perfect night I ever knew—and I’ve seen a good many—and you can’t do so if you’re expecting a wolf or a tiger to spring out of every bush.”She laughed. “I’ll try and be less of a coward, and keep my too-vivid imagination under control.” Yet the light hand which rested on his arm seemed to lean there with ever so increased a pressure of trust or dependence, or both.Is it the movement of bird or beast in the adjoining brake, or is it the tread of a stealthy foot, that makes Claverton suddenly turn and gaze behind him? “I could swear I heard some one,” he thinks to himself; but not a word of this does he say to his companion. Then he laughs at himself for a fool. But he sees not a tall, shadowy figure standing back beneath the shelter of a mimosa tree, watching them over the sprays of the lower scrub. He hears not again that cautious footfall following—following silently as they wend their way along the moonlit path. And what should be farther from his thoughts than danger, real or imaginary?Presently the plash of falling water is heard, and they emerge from the path on to a high, open bank. Beneath, the moon is reflected in the depths of the still, round pool, whose rocky sides throw a black shadow on the surface, while a small cascade slides from a height of ten or twelve feet, and, glancing like a silver thread through festoons of delicate maidenhair fern fringing the polished face of the rock, plunges, with a bell-like plash, into the glassy depths.“That’s pretty, isn’t it?” said Claverton. “In the daytime it isn’t much to look at, but by moonlight it shows up rather well.”“It’s lovely! A perfect picture!”“I thought you’d like it. Sit down there,” he continued, pointing to the smooth, sloping sward, which he has narrowly scrutinised to make sure that no noxious reptile, whether serpent or centipede, is at hand. Yet may he have overlooked the presence of deadlier foe than serpent or centipede, ay, and wolf or leopard, in that peaceful retreat. “How do you think you’ll like being here?”“Very much. I like it already. It is so different to any kind of life I have ever known before—so strange, and wild, and interesting. And then every one here is so kind. Why, I might be a very near relative instead of only a recent acquaintance! The worst of it is, I fear it will spoil me by the time I have to go back to my work.”Her listener bit his lip until the blood flowed. His quick perception had detected the faintest possible sigh of wearyful import which escaped her.“It shall be no fault of mine if you do go back to that same miserable drudgery,” he thought. But it was too early yet to utter the thought aloud, even he felt that. So he only said—and there was a world of tender sympathy in his tone:“I’m afraid you have been working much too hard, and I don’t believe you are in the least fitted for it.”“You must not try and make me discontented, Mr Claverton,” was the answer, with a sad little smile. “The fact is, I do feel the change a great deal more than I ought. Only lately I had a very dear and happy home, now I am entirely alone in the world.”Again that irresistible impulse came over her auditor. Was it really too soon? Why, it seemed as though he had known her for ages. Yet forty-eight hours ago he had not set eyes upon her. For a few moments he could hardly trust himself to speak. Then he said, gently:“Tell me about your old home.” The bush behind them parts, suddenly, noiselessly. A head rises; a great grim black head, with distended eyeballs rolling in the moonlight. Then it sinks again and disappears, but they have not seen it.“I suppose I have no right to feel leaving the old place as I did,” went on Lilian. “We were in a way interlopers, for it belonged to my stepfather, not to our family. I lived there, though, ever since I can remember, and my mother died there. We were very happy but for one thing: I had a stepsister about my own age who detested me. In short, we couldn’t get on together, hard though I tried to like her. So when Mr Dynevard died—”“Who?”“Mr Dynevard. My stepfather,” repeated Lilian.“Of Dynevard Chase, near Sandcombe?”“Yes. Why, you don’t mean to say you know it?” cried Lilian, lost in wonder.“I wish I did. I’m afraid my utmost acquaintance with it lies in having driven past the place once or twice. Some distant relatives of mine lived not far from Sandcombe years ago. So that’s where you used to live?”“Yes. This is a surprise. I shall make you talk to me such a lot about it,” she cried, gleefully. “You will soon be heartily tired of the subject, and will wish you had preserved a discreet silence.”Claverton remembered the reluctance to dwell upon home topics which she had expressed when the two of them were driving up from the town, and it was with an extraordinary sense of relief that he did so. There was nothing more behind it than the painfulness of her change of circumstances to a proud and sensitive nature.“After my stepfather’s death,” went on Lilian, “I thought it best to relieve Eveline Dynevard of my presence, and did so. There you have the whole of my history.”“And then you struck out a line for yourself, and thought to open that miserably hard old oyster, the world, with the blade of a miniature penknife. How enterprising of you!”“No, not at once—at least—at the first, that is—” and she hesitated slightly and the colour rose to her face, as at some painful recollection. Her trepidation was not lost upon her listener, on whom it threw a momentary chill.Again that grim head rises from the bushes, ten yards behind the unsuspecting couple, followed this time by a pair of brawny dark shoulders bent forward in an attitude of intense watchfulness—the attitude of a crouching tiger. Again the moonbeams fall upon a fierce visage and eyes glaring with vengeful hate. They fall on something more—on the gleaming blade of a great assegai, and then the mighty frame of a gigantic savage slowly begins to emerge from the covert.Claverton sees not the baleful stare of his deadly foe, for he is too intent upon gazing at the lovely preoccupied eyes before him, and wondering what is their exact colour, changing as it ever does in the varying light. His companion sees it not, for she is living again in the past. And no zephyr quivers through the silvered leaves or ruffles the pool at their feet, no cloud comes over the calm, fair beauty of the night, no shadow warns of a secret and terrible death hovering over those two, who sit there beneath the witching influences of restful calm, of moonlight, and to one of them—of love.“Confound it!” angrily exclaims Claverton, half rising as the sound of approaching voices and laughter is borne upon the stillness. The threatening form of the watcher disappears—but they have not seen it—and the voices draw nearer. “Our retreat is a retreat no longer. The whole lot of them are bearing down upon us. Always the way.”“Always the way.” So it is. As in small things so in great; we see not the finger of Providence in fortune’s hardest knocks. Yet it must be admitted that these seldom wear the guise of blessings, and we mortals are weak—lamentably weak—and our foresight is simply nil. You two, who resent the intrusion of your fellows into this slumbrous retreat, you little reck that that intrusion is the saving of the life of at least one of you.“But anyhow we must be going back now. As it is they will be wondering what has become of as,” said Lilian, rising.“I suppose we must,” assented her companion, ruefully. He thought he could have sat for ever in that enchanted glade, gazing into the beautiful face and listening to the modulation of that low, tuneful voice. “Ah, well. Now for the madding crowd again.”He wrapped her shawl around her, and they wandered back along the narrow path and beneath the orange trees again. Then as they gained the last gate and the sound of music and laughter betokened that they were close to the house, Lilian lingered a moment to look back towards the moonlit pool.“It is a sweet place, and we have had a lovely walk,” she said. “I did enjoy it so. Thanks so much for bringing me.”What did she mean? Was she blind? He paused with his hand on the half-open gate, and glanced at her with a curious expression.A small runnel of water coursed along at their feet, shining and glowing in the moonlight, and she was standing on the single plank that spanned it. Was she blind, that she failed to read even one-tenth of what that look expressed? But he made some ordinary remark, and they passed on.“Why, where in the world have you two been?” said Mrs Brathwaite as they entered.“Playing truant. Miss Strange had a slight headache, and I recommended fresh air as a counteracting influence. Then we discovered that we had been near neighbours for some years without knowing it, and got talking English ‘shop’,” answered Claverton. The latter half of his statement was not strictly historical, but the speaker salved his conscience with the trite reflection that “all’s fair in love and war.”“How curious!” said the old lady, in her interest in the coincidence losing sight of the delinquency and forgetting mildly to scold him therefor. “But it’s astonishing how small the world is, when one comes to think of it.”“Mr Claverton,” said Lilian, reproachfully, an hour later. “I’m surprised at you. How could you say we were neighbours for ‘some years’ when you knew we were not?”He laughed. “Were we not? Then we ought to have been. It was the merest accident of time and place that precluded it.” He could not make to her the excuse he had made to his own conscience—at least—not yet.Pass we again to the silence of the garden. Who is this leaning against yonder fence alone and gazing with stony, set face straight in front of her? Can it be Ethel? Yes, it is. The laughing, saucy lips, so ready with badinage and repartee, are closed tightly together, and the blue eyes, erewhile flashing and sparkling with light-hearted mirth, now start forth with a hard stare. Must we, in the interests of our story, partially withdraw the curtain from her reflections? Even so, let us do it as gently as possible.“He never looked atmelike that,” she murmured, referring to the two on the little plank bridge. “Ought I to have betrayed my presence? I don’t know. I couldn’t, somehow; and they weren’t saying anything. But that look—how plainly I saw it! O, God! if only it had been given to me—tome,” she went on, passionately, “I would cheerfully have died at this moment.”She paused, and slowly the tears welled to the swimming eyes, and glistened in the moonlight. “All the walks and rides we’ve had together; all the time we have been thrown together! Good God! if I could but live it over again! Since the very moment I saw him come in, and he looked me up and down in that calm, searching way of his—it seems only like yesterday. He never thought of me but as something to amuse him—a pretty plaything—to be thrown aside for a better. No, I am wronging him; never by word or look did he deceive me. It is I who am a fool—an idiot—and must pay the penalty of my folly; but—how could I help it?”And the sounds of revelry came ever and anon from the lighted windows; and, without, all nature slept in a tranquil hush, and the pale stars gleamed in the sky—gleamed coldly down upon the lonely watcher.“How I flouted you, and said hard, sharp things to you, darling; every one of them goes through me like a knife as I remember it. Yet that was at first, and—how could I tell?” and a great sob shook the delicate frame. “But help me, my pride! Oh, love, you will never know. The same roof will cover us, and I must talk and even laugh with you as before—and see you and her together; but—you will never know. Ah! what a deal it takes to break one poor little heart! And—how I hateher!”A voice intrudes upon her reflections, quick, gruff, and horribly familiar. “Oh, there you are, Miss Brathwaite,” it says, “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”The voice acts upon her even as the trumpet blast upon the proverbial charger. Not a trace of any recent emotion is visible as she turns and faces her persistent but unwelcome admirer, Will Jeffreys.“And you’ve found me. What can I do for you?”The young fellow is staggered. The fact is that, warmed by the exhilarating exercise and the yet more exhilarating stimulant which he has imbibed pretty freely in the course of the evening, he has screwed up his courage to the sticking point, and intends to throw the dice of his fate with Ethel before the said exalted quality has time to cool, which process of refrigeration, it may be remarked, has already begun.“Well, thereissomething you can do for me,” he says.“What is it? Do you want a partner for the next dance?—because, I’ll be in directly,” she asks, quickly.The very tones of her voice ought to have brought home to Jeffreys the inexpediency of pursuing his subject for the present; but some persons are singularly deficient in a sense of the fitness of things or of times, and he was one.“No; it isn’t that. I want to say something—something about me—and about you,” he blunders, lamely; but she will give him no help, “and—I must—say it—to-night—Ethel!” he jerks out.“For goodness’ sake don’t say it to-night, or at any other time,” replies she, decisively, putting out her hand, with a gesture as if to stop him. It has the desired effect. Even Jeffreys’ dull wits are alive to the conviction that his is not merely a losing game, but a lost one; and the reflection exasperates him.“Oh, I might have known,” was the sneering reply. “Of course—no one has been fit to speak to since that fellow Claverton came.”She turned upon him, her face white with wrath in the moonlight. “Wilfred Jeffreys, you are a brave fellow. You have found me here alone, and have taken the opportunity of insulting me. Now what do you think I am going to do?”“What?”“I am going in to ask uncle to put away the brandy decanter,” said she, in tones of bitter scorn; and without another word she walked away, leaving him standing there looking and feeling, from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet, a thorough fool.Within doors the fun is kept up with a zest characteristic of such entertainments. There are no shy ones left now, all are merged in the ranks of the confident.Crash!Down comes Hicks like a felled tree, right in the middle of the room. Matters are at a momentary standstill, and the unlucky one slowly and shamefacedly picks himself up, red and wrathful and covered with confusion. He is muttering maledictions on the head of the guileless Allen, which ass, he declares, not content with cannoning against him, tripped him up.“Never mind, jump up. Lucky it’sbeforesupper,” laughs jovial Jim Brathwaite.“Hicks, old man, Itoldyou to draw the line at that fourth glass,” says the irrepressible Armitage in a mighty stage whisper as he whirls by, grinning with malicious delight. The truth being that Hicks is the most abstemious wight in the world. But the remark does not pass unheeded, and a laugh, varying in tone from open guffaw to suppressed titter, further exasperates and discomfits the luckless stumbler, who vows vengeance on his tormentor.Then comes supper, which must be attended to in relays, space being limited. A Dutchman is desperately anxious to make a speech, and is with difficulty quelled; while Jack Armitage, who has a bet on with some one that old Garrett being too far gone to detect the fraud, he will make him drink three tumblers of water under the impression that it is grog, is using the noble spur, emulation, to induce that worthy to swallow the third, and winks and grins triumphantly at the loser as he succeeds. Meanwhile piano and violin never flag, till at length the waning summer night begins to hint pretty broadly that it is time to knock off.Then a great deal of inspanning and saddling up; of hunting for stray saddle-cloths and bridles which have gone adrift; not a little wrangling among the coloured stable hands belonging to the place or to the guests, and finally most of the latter are gone. The residue will tarry for a shakedown and a rest.“Good-night—at sunrise!”A pressure from a soft, taper hand; a sweet glance from a pair of rather tired eyes, and the door closes on a tall vision in soft creamy draperies.The recipient of that pressure of the hand, that playful glance, turns away like a man in a dream. Half instinctively he makes his way to Hicks’ quarters. Here he is enthusiastically hailed.“Hallo, Arthur. Come and blow a cloud before you turn in. All these chaps are asleep already.”“All right,” was the reply, and the speaker, picking his way among several slumbering wights who rolled in blankets had compassed impromptu shakedowns on the floor of Hicks’ room, seated himself at the foot of the latter’s stretcher. “Give us a fill.”

The long dining-room is in a blaze of light, such as it has not sparkled with for some considerable time, and only then on rare and special occasions such as the present one. The polished floor reflects the glow of numerous candles, and, as Hicks vigorously puts it, the decks are thoroughly cleared for action. Expectant groups stand about the room or throng the doorways—for the fun has not yet commenced, and meanwhile talk and laughter goes on among the jovial spirits there foregathered, and the graver ones, when not the subjects of rally, are intent on contemplating the floor, the ceiling, the fireplace, or anything or nothing. The party might be an English one to all appearances. You may descry the usual phases in its ingredients. There is shy humanity, confident humanity, blatant humanity, fussy humanity, even pompous humanity. There, however, the resemblance ends. Of stiffness there is none. Everybody knows everybody, or soon will—meanwhile acts as if it does. Then, in the little matter of attire, many of the “lords of creation” are arrayed in orthodox evening costume and white-chokered, others in black coats of the “go-to-meeting” order, while three or four Dutchmen, bidden to the festivity on neighbourly grounds, sport raiment fearfully and wonderfully made, whose effect is enhanced by terrific neckties, varying in shades from scarlet to green. The company is composed almost entirely of the settler class. Jolly old fellows who have come to look on at the enjoyment of their extensive and well-looking families in various stages of adolescence, and who, in spite of their white hair and sixty or seventy summers, seem more than half inclined not to remain passive spectators of the fun. One or two of these, by the way, judging from nasal rubicundity and other signs, will, I trow, be found more frequently hovering around the charmed circle where flows the genial dram, than in the immediate neighbourhood of the giddy rout. Middle-aged men, bronzed and bearded, looking serious as they contemplate what is expected of them, for assuredly we English, in whatever part of the world we be, “take our pleasures sadly.” Young settlers are there, stalwart fellows, several of whom have ridden from far, carrying their gala array in a saddle-bag, and who by the time they return will have been three days away from home. But distance is nothing; their horses are strong and hardy, and the roads are good, and if not, what matters? Life is nothing without its enjoyments, and accordingly they intend to enjoy themselves, and do.

Of the fair sex there is a goodly muster—though fewer in proportion to that of the men, as is frequently the case at frontier dances—consisting of the wives and daughters of the settlers. Some are pretty, some plain; some are bright and lively, and nicely dressed; others again are badly attired, and neither bright nor lively; and at present they are mostly gathered together in the room opening out of the one which is to be the scene of the fray.

“Now then, Hicks, Armitage, some of you fellows, let’s set the ball rolling,” cried the jovial voice of Jim Brathwaite, as a volunteer pianist (the orchestral department must be worked entirely by volunteer agency) sat down at the instrument and dashed off a lively galop. “Come along, Arthur, give these fellows a lead,” he went on.

Claverton was standing in the doorway. He turned as Jim addressed him. “Well, if it’s all the same, I think I’ll cut in later. Fact is, I’m not much of a dancer. Besides, it’s a ridiculous exercise.”

“Aren’t you! ‘England expects,’” said Ethel, maliciously, as she floated by, a dream-like vision in pink gauziness. Her golden hair, confined by some cunning device at the back of her head, flowed in shining ripples below her waist, and the deep blue eyes flashed laughingly into his as she made her mocking rejoinder.

“Does it? Expectations are notoriously unsafe assets,” was the quiet reply.

“Well, we must make a start or we shall never get these fellows to begin,” said Jim. “Come along, Ethel, you promised me the first dance. If you didn’t you ought to have.”

They glided off, and Claverton stood and followed them mechanically with his glance; but, as a matter of fact, he hardly saw them. He was wondering what on earth had become of Lilian Strange. The dance wore on, and then the next, still Claverton stood in the doorway, which coign of vantage he held conjointly with an uncouth-looking Dutchman and a burly but bashful compatriot, and stillshedid not appear. At length, while crossing the inner room with a vague idea of putting an artless and roundabout inquiry or two to Mrs Brathwaite as to why Lilian did not appear, he heard himself hailed by his host. Turning quickly he perceived the latter sitting in confab with a contemporary in age, but vastly different in appearance.

“Arthur, this is an old friend of mine, Mr Garrett.”

Then arose a queer-looking old fellow, short, rotund of person, and whose exceeding rubicundity of visage betokened, I fear, anything but aversion for ardent spirits. Running one stubby hand through his bristly grey hair, he extended the other to Claverton.

“’Ow do—’ow do? Not been long in the country, have you? My word, but it’s a fine country, this is—fine country for young fellers like you.”

Claverton thought the country contained also some advantages for the speaker; and he was right. Here was old Joe Garrett, who never knew his father, if he had one, and who, having early in the century deserted from a two-hundred-ton merchant brig lying in Algoa Bay, had started in colonial life as a journeyman carpenter. By hook or by crook he had made his way, and now, by virtue of the four fine farms which he owned, he deemed himself very much of a landed proprietor, and every whit the equal of Walter Brathwaite, “whose ancestors wore chain-armour in the fourteenth century,” as some one or other’s definition of a gentleman runs.

“I was jest such a young feller as you once,” went on this embodiment of colonial progress. “I landed in this country in nothin’ but the clothes to my back, and look at me now. Now, I’ll tell you what I did,” and the oracle, slapping one finger into the palm of the of her hand, looked up into his victim’s face with would-be impressive gravity, “I worked; that’s what I did—I worked. Now, you may depend upon it, that for a young feller there’s nothin’ like a noo country—and work!”

“I suppose so,” acquiesced Claverton, horribly sick of this biography.

“Now a noo country,” went on the oracle, “a noo country, sez I, ain’t an old one. ’Ere you’re free; there,” flinging out a stubby hand in the imaginary direction of Great Britain, “nothing but forms and sticklin’. Now, ’ere I can sit down to dinner without putting on a swallow-tail-coat and a white choker, for instance. No; give me a noo country and freedom, sez I.”

“Quite right, Mr Garrett. A swallow-tailed coat plays the mischief with the digestion, and science has discovered that a white choker tarnishes the silver. Something in the starch, you know—arsenic, they say.”

“No! You don’t say so now?” returned the other, open-mouthed, and not detecting the fine irony of his banterer’s tone.

“Yes, of course. And now excuse me. I must go and find my partner.”

“Certainly—certainly. You young fellers! I was a young feller once, ha, ha, ha!” And old Garrett winked, and contorted his visage in the direction of his recent interlocutor in such wise as should mean volumes.

“This is ours, Miss Strange.”

Lilian had just come in. She had passed close behind the speaker while he was talking to old Garrett, and her entrance did not remain long undiscovered.

“Do you know, I had quite begun to fear you were not going to appear to-night—that you were tired or unwell,” he said, as they made their way to the dancing-room.

“Bight and wrong. I was tired, and so rested instead of dressing earlier. Now I am all right again, and never felt so well in my life.”

“Nor looked it.”

It slipped out. The slightest possible flush came into Lilian’s face.

“You must not pay me compliments, Mr Claverton,” she said, gravely, but with a smile lurking in her eyes. “They are what you men call ‘bad form.’”

“But consider the provocation.”

“Again? What am I to do to you? I know. I shall scold you. This is the second time to-day that you have reproached me for being late. This morning and now.”

Certesthe provocation was excessive. She was looking surpassingly beautiful this evening, in creamy white, with a velvety rose of deepest crimson on her breast; another bud, a white one, nestling among the thick coils of her bronze-tinted dark hair. Many a glance of astonished admiration greeted her entrance, and followed her about the room; but the quiet repose of the lovely face was devoid of the least sign of self-consciousness.

“By Jove!” remarked Armitage to his partner, a chubby little “bunch” with big blue eyes and a button mouth. “Claverton’s a sly dog.That’swhy he was in no hurry to begin. Oho, I see now.”

“Sheispretty. How well they look together!” was the reply, as the two stood against the wall to watch them.

Ethel, whirling by with the Civil Commissioner’s clerk, caught the last remark. She would have given much to have been able to box poor little Gertie Wray’s ears severely, then and there. That young lady babbled on, utterly void of offence.

“I say, though,” said her partner. “She cut you out. Claverton was just on his way to ask you when she came in. He was, really.”

“Was he? Then he should have asked me before. My programme’s full now.”

Meanwhile let us follow the pair under discussion.

“Who was that poor old man you were chaffing so, just now?” Lilian was saying.

“Only a curious specimen of natural history. But how do you know I was chaffing anybody?”

“Because I heard you. Who is he?”

“What perception you have got! ‘He’ is old Garrett, hight Joe, who migrated hither in the year one, to escape the terrible evil of having to dress for dinner.”

Lilian could not speak for laughing.

“Fact, really; he’s just been telling me all about it. Bother! This dance is at an end. We are down for some more together, though.”

“Too many.”

“I claim priority of right. I claim your sympathy as a fellow sojourner in a far country. I appeal to your compassion to rescue me from standing out in the cold, in that you are the only one with whom I can gravitate round this festal room without peril to my neighbours’ elbows and shins, and they know it, and shunt me accordingly.”

“I don’t believe a word of it,” laughed Lilian. “It is you who shunt them.”

“No, I am telling you solemn truth. And now have I not made it clear to you that it is your bounden duty to take pity on me and help the proverbial lame dog over the ditto stile?”

“Well then, I’ll see what I can do for you. Now find me a seat—there, thank you—and go and ‘victimise’ some one else,” she added, flashing up at him a bright, mischievous glance.

“Not yet. Have pity on—the public elbow and shin. I want to rest, too, after discharging my recent heavy responsibility without disaster;” and he made a move towards the seat beside her.

“No. You are not to shirk your duty. Go and do as I wish, or I shall consider it my duty to lose my programme. That means a new one, blank, and then memory is not a trustworthy guide.” And as at that moment some one came up to ask her for a dance, Claverton was constrained unwillingly to obey, or rather, partially to obey, for he fell back on his old position in the convenient doorway, whence his eyes followed her round and round the room, to the complete exclusion of the other score of revolving couples.

“Mr Claverton, do prove a friend in need, and save me from the clutches of that awful Dutchman bearing down upon me from over there,” said a flurried, but familiar voice at his elbow. “I promised him in a weak moment, and now he’s coming. Say you’ve got me down for this, and persuade him it’s his mistake. Quick! here he comes.”

“All right. But you told me once you’d rather go round with a chair, you know, than with me.”

“Did I? Never mind; don’t be mean and rake up things,” replied Ethel, and away they went, while the defrauded Boer, thinking his own sluggish brain was at fault in the reckoning, adjourned to a certain corner of the other room in order to solace his wounded feelings with asopje(dram).

“How about England’s disappointment?” said Ethel, maliciously, during a pause.

“That affliction has been indefinitely averted. By the way, I never thought to see Allen so screwed.”

“Er—I’m not screwed,” mildly objected that long-suffering youth, who had pulled up with a swaying jerk alongside of them.

“Aren’t you? My good fellow, a man who is capable of mistaking my substantial and visible means of support for this exceedingly well-polished floor, must be in a critical condition.”

“Oh—ah—er—was that you I trod upon? I didn’t know—I’m awfully sorry.”

Half-a-dozen bystanders exploded at this, and the dance over, Claverton began to think he had done a considerable share of duty, and sought an opportunity of claiming an instalment of the promised reward; but his turn had not yet come. Presently he overheard a girl near him say:

“What do you think of that Miss Strange?”

He recognised in the speaker one Jessie Garrett, a daughter of Joe of that ilk.

“Well, she’s very pretty, there’s no doubt about that,” answered her partner, a stalwart young ostrich-farmer from the Graaff Reinet district.

“Should you admire her as much as Ethel Brathwaite?”

“No; I don’t think she’s a patch on Miss Brathwaite; but there’s something awfully fetching about her, for all that.”

“Well, there’s no accounting for tastes. I think she’s too colourless—washed-out looking,”—a fault the speaker herself could in no wise plead guilty to. She was a pretty girl herself, in the florid, barmaid style, but as different a creature to Lilian Strange as a plump dabchick to an Arctic tern.

Claverton’s lips curled as he looked from the offending couple to the object of their remarks.

Sheto be discussed according to the clod-hopping ideas of louts and scullery-maids. He turned away disgusted. Suddenly he heard himself hailed in loud and jovial tones, and, looking up, found himself in the vicinity of the refreshment table, where three or four ancient settlers were exchanging reminiscences, and occasionally clinking glasses. Prominent among them was old Garrett, his rubicund visage now nearly purple.

“I sh-shay, C-Claveringsh!” called out this worthy. “C-come and have a what-sh-may call a eye-opener—hic!”

“All right.”

“Thas righ’sh. Told yer ’ee ain’t proud,” cried the old fellow, beaming triumphantly on the rest, and attempting to bestow upon Claverton a friendly slap on the back, which the latter quietly evaded. He contemplated the individual before him with vast amusement, and speculated as to how soon this worthy’s early retirement would become imperative.

The rout went on, and presently Naylor and his violin were pressed into the service to second the piano. In the passage outside a number of the Hottentot servants, emulative of their betters, had got up a dance of their own and waxed merry, and laughed and chattered exceedingly, till at last Jim Brathwaite, hearing the row, sallied forth and cleared them all out summarily.

The hours wear on apace. In the silence of the garden the air is fragrant with the cool breaths of night distilling from the myrtle and the flowering pomegranate. High in the heavens hangs a gold half-moon whose lustre pierces a leafy canopy, scattering a network of filmy light upon the shaded earth. In and out of the gloomy shadows of the orange trees a firefly or two trails in mid air a floating spark. All is rest. Now and again a burst of voices and music is borne from the house, yet here it penetrates but feebly, and Night—silver, moon-pierced, star-studded Night—is queen amid the mysterious silence of her witching court.

Two figures wandering down the orange walk in the alternate light, and gloom, and dimness. Listen! That low, melodious voice can belong to no other than Lilian Strange.

“I am so glad we came out here for a little. I had no idea there could be such a night as this except in books.”

“Perhaps it strikes you the more, contrasted with the row and junketing indoors,” said her companion.

“No. In any case it would be delicious. And yet there is something of awe about a night like this—don’t laugh at me—it always seems a mysterious shadow-land connecting us with another world.”

“Laugh at you! Why won’t you give me credit for a capability of entering into any of your ideas?”

“But I do. You are more capable of it than any one I know. There.”

“Thanks for that, anyway.”

“Don’t stop my rhapsodies, but listen. Doesn’t it seem—standing here in this stillness—as if the world lay far beneath one’s feet; that all the littlenesses and prosaic worries of every-day life could not enter such an enchanted realm? Ah-h!”

She uttered a little cry and instinctively drew closer to him as the sudden, yelping bark of a jackal sounded from the bush apparently within fifty yards of them, but really much further off, the stillness and a slight echo adding loudness to the unlooked-for and ill-sounding “bay.”

“Don’t be afraid,” he said, reassuringly. “It’s only a jackal. What would you have done if it had been a wolf?”

“I should have been dreadfully frightened. What a coward I am!”

“At any rate, this time I am not the author of the scare, which is subject-matter for gratulation,” he said.

She laughed. “No; but the interruption came in most opportunely, in time to stay my flights. Here am I, inveighing against, and thinking to rise superior to the prosaic commonplaces of life, when a sound, a mere sound, fills me with an overwhelming impulse to rush headlong back into the despised prose. What a step from the sublime to the ridiculous!”

“I was thinking something of the kind,” replied Claverton, with a half smile; and his voice grew very soft as he looked at her sweet, serious face. “But don’t be in the least afraid. A jackal is about as formidable or aggressive as a tabby cat, though he does make a diabolical row; and as for wolves, they are very scarce, and even more cowardly; and a yet bolder animal would flee from two such unwonted apparitions in the South African bush,” he added, with a laugh, as he glanced at the regulation “evening-dress” of his companion and himself. “Come this way.”

He opened a small gate in the high quince hedge, and they passed out into a narrow bush path which, wound along through thespekboemand feathery mimosa.

“Don’t be in the very least afraid,” he repeated, as they wandered on. “I want you thoroughly to appreciate and enjoy about the most perfect night I ever knew—and I’ve seen a good many—and you can’t do so if you’re expecting a wolf or a tiger to spring out of every bush.”

She laughed. “I’ll try and be less of a coward, and keep my too-vivid imagination under control.” Yet the light hand which rested on his arm seemed to lean there with ever so increased a pressure of trust or dependence, or both.

Is it the movement of bird or beast in the adjoining brake, or is it the tread of a stealthy foot, that makes Claverton suddenly turn and gaze behind him? “I could swear I heard some one,” he thinks to himself; but not a word of this does he say to his companion. Then he laughs at himself for a fool. But he sees not a tall, shadowy figure standing back beneath the shelter of a mimosa tree, watching them over the sprays of the lower scrub. He hears not again that cautious footfall following—following silently as they wend their way along the moonlit path. And what should be farther from his thoughts than danger, real or imaginary?

Presently the plash of falling water is heard, and they emerge from the path on to a high, open bank. Beneath, the moon is reflected in the depths of the still, round pool, whose rocky sides throw a black shadow on the surface, while a small cascade slides from a height of ten or twelve feet, and, glancing like a silver thread through festoons of delicate maidenhair fern fringing the polished face of the rock, plunges, with a bell-like plash, into the glassy depths.

“That’s pretty, isn’t it?” said Claverton. “In the daytime it isn’t much to look at, but by moonlight it shows up rather well.”

“It’s lovely! A perfect picture!”

“I thought you’d like it. Sit down there,” he continued, pointing to the smooth, sloping sward, which he has narrowly scrutinised to make sure that no noxious reptile, whether serpent or centipede, is at hand. Yet may he have overlooked the presence of deadlier foe than serpent or centipede, ay, and wolf or leopard, in that peaceful retreat. “How do you think you’ll like being here?”

“Very much. I like it already. It is so different to any kind of life I have ever known before—so strange, and wild, and interesting. And then every one here is so kind. Why, I might be a very near relative instead of only a recent acquaintance! The worst of it is, I fear it will spoil me by the time I have to go back to my work.”

Her listener bit his lip until the blood flowed. His quick perception had detected the faintest possible sigh of wearyful import which escaped her.

“It shall be no fault of mine if you do go back to that same miserable drudgery,” he thought. But it was too early yet to utter the thought aloud, even he felt that. So he only said—and there was a world of tender sympathy in his tone:

“I’m afraid you have been working much too hard, and I don’t believe you are in the least fitted for it.”

“You must not try and make me discontented, Mr Claverton,” was the answer, with a sad little smile. “The fact is, I do feel the change a great deal more than I ought. Only lately I had a very dear and happy home, now I am entirely alone in the world.”

Again that irresistible impulse came over her auditor. Was it really too soon? Why, it seemed as though he had known her for ages. Yet forty-eight hours ago he had not set eyes upon her. For a few moments he could hardly trust himself to speak. Then he said, gently:

“Tell me about your old home.” The bush behind them parts, suddenly, noiselessly. A head rises; a great grim black head, with distended eyeballs rolling in the moonlight. Then it sinks again and disappears, but they have not seen it.

“I suppose I have no right to feel leaving the old place as I did,” went on Lilian. “We were in a way interlopers, for it belonged to my stepfather, not to our family. I lived there, though, ever since I can remember, and my mother died there. We were very happy but for one thing: I had a stepsister about my own age who detested me. In short, we couldn’t get on together, hard though I tried to like her. So when Mr Dynevard died—”

“Who?”

“Mr Dynevard. My stepfather,” repeated Lilian.

“Of Dynevard Chase, near Sandcombe?”

“Yes. Why, you don’t mean to say you know it?” cried Lilian, lost in wonder.

“I wish I did. I’m afraid my utmost acquaintance with it lies in having driven past the place once or twice. Some distant relatives of mine lived not far from Sandcombe years ago. So that’s where you used to live?”

“Yes. This is a surprise. I shall make you talk to me such a lot about it,” she cried, gleefully. “You will soon be heartily tired of the subject, and will wish you had preserved a discreet silence.”

Claverton remembered the reluctance to dwell upon home topics which she had expressed when the two of them were driving up from the town, and it was with an extraordinary sense of relief that he did so. There was nothing more behind it than the painfulness of her change of circumstances to a proud and sensitive nature.

“After my stepfather’s death,” went on Lilian, “I thought it best to relieve Eveline Dynevard of my presence, and did so. There you have the whole of my history.”

“And then you struck out a line for yourself, and thought to open that miserably hard old oyster, the world, with the blade of a miniature penknife. How enterprising of you!”

“No, not at once—at least—at the first, that is—” and she hesitated slightly and the colour rose to her face, as at some painful recollection. Her trepidation was not lost upon her listener, on whom it threw a momentary chill.

Again that grim head rises from the bushes, ten yards behind the unsuspecting couple, followed this time by a pair of brawny dark shoulders bent forward in an attitude of intense watchfulness—the attitude of a crouching tiger. Again the moonbeams fall upon a fierce visage and eyes glaring with vengeful hate. They fall on something more—on the gleaming blade of a great assegai, and then the mighty frame of a gigantic savage slowly begins to emerge from the covert.

Claverton sees not the baleful stare of his deadly foe, for he is too intent upon gazing at the lovely preoccupied eyes before him, and wondering what is their exact colour, changing as it ever does in the varying light. His companion sees it not, for she is living again in the past. And no zephyr quivers through the silvered leaves or ruffles the pool at their feet, no cloud comes over the calm, fair beauty of the night, no shadow warns of a secret and terrible death hovering over those two, who sit there beneath the witching influences of restful calm, of moonlight, and to one of them—of love.

“Confound it!” angrily exclaims Claverton, half rising as the sound of approaching voices and laughter is borne upon the stillness. The threatening form of the watcher disappears—but they have not seen it—and the voices draw nearer. “Our retreat is a retreat no longer. The whole lot of them are bearing down upon us. Always the way.”

“Always the way.” So it is. As in small things so in great; we see not the finger of Providence in fortune’s hardest knocks. Yet it must be admitted that these seldom wear the guise of blessings, and we mortals are weak—lamentably weak—and our foresight is simply nil. You two, who resent the intrusion of your fellows into this slumbrous retreat, you little reck that that intrusion is the saving of the life of at least one of you.

“But anyhow we must be going back now. As it is they will be wondering what has become of as,” said Lilian, rising.

“I suppose we must,” assented her companion, ruefully. He thought he could have sat for ever in that enchanted glade, gazing into the beautiful face and listening to the modulation of that low, tuneful voice. “Ah, well. Now for the madding crowd again.”

He wrapped her shawl around her, and they wandered back along the narrow path and beneath the orange trees again. Then as they gained the last gate and the sound of music and laughter betokened that they were close to the house, Lilian lingered a moment to look back towards the moonlit pool.

“It is a sweet place, and we have had a lovely walk,” she said. “I did enjoy it so. Thanks so much for bringing me.”

What did she mean? Was she blind? He paused with his hand on the half-open gate, and glanced at her with a curious expression.

A small runnel of water coursed along at their feet, shining and glowing in the moonlight, and she was standing on the single plank that spanned it. Was she blind, that she failed to read even one-tenth of what that look expressed? But he made some ordinary remark, and they passed on.

“Why, where in the world have you two been?” said Mrs Brathwaite as they entered.

“Playing truant. Miss Strange had a slight headache, and I recommended fresh air as a counteracting influence. Then we discovered that we had been near neighbours for some years without knowing it, and got talking English ‘shop’,” answered Claverton. The latter half of his statement was not strictly historical, but the speaker salved his conscience with the trite reflection that “all’s fair in love and war.”

“How curious!” said the old lady, in her interest in the coincidence losing sight of the delinquency and forgetting mildly to scold him therefor. “But it’s astonishing how small the world is, when one comes to think of it.”

“Mr Claverton,” said Lilian, reproachfully, an hour later. “I’m surprised at you. How could you say we were neighbours for ‘some years’ when you knew we were not?”

He laughed. “Were we not? Then we ought to have been. It was the merest accident of time and place that precluded it.” He could not make to her the excuse he had made to his own conscience—at least—not yet.

Pass we again to the silence of the garden. Who is this leaning against yonder fence alone and gazing with stony, set face straight in front of her? Can it be Ethel? Yes, it is. The laughing, saucy lips, so ready with badinage and repartee, are closed tightly together, and the blue eyes, erewhile flashing and sparkling with light-hearted mirth, now start forth with a hard stare. Must we, in the interests of our story, partially withdraw the curtain from her reflections? Even so, let us do it as gently as possible.

“He never looked atmelike that,” she murmured, referring to the two on the little plank bridge. “Ought I to have betrayed my presence? I don’t know. I couldn’t, somehow; and they weren’t saying anything. But that look—how plainly I saw it! O, God! if only it had been given to me—tome,” she went on, passionately, “I would cheerfully have died at this moment.”

She paused, and slowly the tears welled to the swimming eyes, and glistened in the moonlight. “All the walks and rides we’ve had together; all the time we have been thrown together! Good God! if I could but live it over again! Since the very moment I saw him come in, and he looked me up and down in that calm, searching way of his—it seems only like yesterday. He never thought of me but as something to amuse him—a pretty plaything—to be thrown aside for a better. No, I am wronging him; never by word or look did he deceive me. It is I who am a fool—an idiot—and must pay the penalty of my folly; but—how could I help it?”

And the sounds of revelry came ever and anon from the lighted windows; and, without, all nature slept in a tranquil hush, and the pale stars gleamed in the sky—gleamed coldly down upon the lonely watcher.

“How I flouted you, and said hard, sharp things to you, darling; every one of them goes through me like a knife as I remember it. Yet that was at first, and—how could I tell?” and a great sob shook the delicate frame. “But help me, my pride! Oh, love, you will never know. The same roof will cover us, and I must talk and even laugh with you as before—and see you and her together; but—you will never know. Ah! what a deal it takes to break one poor little heart! And—how I hateher!”

A voice intrudes upon her reflections, quick, gruff, and horribly familiar. “Oh, there you are, Miss Brathwaite,” it says, “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

The voice acts upon her even as the trumpet blast upon the proverbial charger. Not a trace of any recent emotion is visible as she turns and faces her persistent but unwelcome admirer, Will Jeffreys.

“And you’ve found me. What can I do for you?”

The young fellow is staggered. The fact is that, warmed by the exhilarating exercise and the yet more exhilarating stimulant which he has imbibed pretty freely in the course of the evening, he has screwed up his courage to the sticking point, and intends to throw the dice of his fate with Ethel before the said exalted quality has time to cool, which process of refrigeration, it may be remarked, has already begun.

“Well, thereissomething you can do for me,” he says.

“What is it? Do you want a partner for the next dance?—because, I’ll be in directly,” she asks, quickly.

The very tones of her voice ought to have brought home to Jeffreys the inexpediency of pursuing his subject for the present; but some persons are singularly deficient in a sense of the fitness of things or of times, and he was one.

“No; it isn’t that. I want to say something—something about me—and about you,” he blunders, lamely; but she will give him no help, “and—I must—say it—to-night—Ethel!” he jerks out.

“For goodness’ sake don’t say it to-night, or at any other time,” replies she, decisively, putting out her hand, with a gesture as if to stop him. It has the desired effect. Even Jeffreys’ dull wits are alive to the conviction that his is not merely a losing game, but a lost one; and the reflection exasperates him.

“Oh, I might have known,” was the sneering reply. “Of course—no one has been fit to speak to since that fellow Claverton came.”

She turned upon him, her face white with wrath in the moonlight. “Wilfred Jeffreys, you are a brave fellow. You have found me here alone, and have taken the opportunity of insulting me. Now what do you think I am going to do?”

“What?”

“I am going in to ask uncle to put away the brandy decanter,” said she, in tones of bitter scorn; and without another word she walked away, leaving him standing there looking and feeling, from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet, a thorough fool.

Within doors the fun is kept up with a zest characteristic of such entertainments. There are no shy ones left now, all are merged in the ranks of the confident.

Crash!

Down comes Hicks like a felled tree, right in the middle of the room. Matters are at a momentary standstill, and the unlucky one slowly and shamefacedly picks himself up, red and wrathful and covered with confusion. He is muttering maledictions on the head of the guileless Allen, which ass, he declares, not content with cannoning against him, tripped him up.

“Never mind, jump up. Lucky it’sbeforesupper,” laughs jovial Jim Brathwaite.

“Hicks, old man, Itoldyou to draw the line at that fourth glass,” says the irrepressible Armitage in a mighty stage whisper as he whirls by, grinning with malicious delight. The truth being that Hicks is the most abstemious wight in the world. But the remark does not pass unheeded, and a laugh, varying in tone from open guffaw to suppressed titter, further exasperates and discomfits the luckless stumbler, who vows vengeance on his tormentor.

Then comes supper, which must be attended to in relays, space being limited. A Dutchman is desperately anxious to make a speech, and is with difficulty quelled; while Jack Armitage, who has a bet on with some one that old Garrett being too far gone to detect the fraud, he will make him drink three tumblers of water under the impression that it is grog, is using the noble spur, emulation, to induce that worthy to swallow the third, and winks and grins triumphantly at the loser as he succeeds. Meanwhile piano and violin never flag, till at length the waning summer night begins to hint pretty broadly that it is time to knock off.

Then a great deal of inspanning and saddling up; of hunting for stray saddle-cloths and bridles which have gone adrift; not a little wrangling among the coloured stable hands belonging to the place or to the guests, and finally most of the latter are gone. The residue will tarry for a shakedown and a rest.

“Good-night—at sunrise!”

A pressure from a soft, taper hand; a sweet glance from a pair of rather tired eyes, and the door closes on a tall vision in soft creamy draperies.

The recipient of that pressure of the hand, that playful glance, turns away like a man in a dream. Half instinctively he makes his way to Hicks’ quarters. Here he is enthusiastically hailed.

“Hallo, Arthur. Come and blow a cloud before you turn in. All these chaps are asleep already.”

“All right,” was the reply, and the speaker, picking his way among several slumbering wights who rolled in blankets had compassed impromptu shakedowns on the floor of Hicks’ room, seated himself at the foot of the latter’s stretcher. “Give us a fill.”

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