Chapter Twenty One.

Chapter Twenty One.The meeting with Holman and the latter’s reference to the girl of the beach brought Matheson’s memory with a swing back to Brenda and his promise to her. In all these weeks he had not thought of her twice, nor looked at the address she had given him at his request. He took it out when he got back to his rooms, and considered the wisdom of writing to her in a calm, detached way, and with a view to possible developments.Finally he decided that he would write, and did so, asking for news of her. He despatched his letter, and waited in a state of curious uncertainty for her reply. When the reply did not come this uncertainty as to the real state of his wishes yielded to a very genuine disappointment. It was no longer a matter of indifference to him; he wanted to hear from her, wanted her friendship.Some months later, after he was back in Cape Town, his own letter was returned to him through the post office, with the unsatisfactory information pencilled upon it. “Gone away, address not known.” He had waited too long; it was not possible now to get into touch with her.He was sorry for this. He found himself wondering why she had left Mrs Graham, where she had gone. He worried about her. It was not easy to put his anxiety into words, but he had a feeling, strengthened possibly by the fact that she had left no address behind, that the loss of her former post was in the nature of a disaster. It couldn’t, he reflected uneasily, be consequent on that moonlight walk... She had so feared being late, and he had displayed impatience at having to hasten. Perhaps after all she had been late... It was beastly unjust that a little thing like that should have such disproportionate results. He wondered why women didn’t combine and insist upon fairer conditions. Even a companion should be privileged to count certain hours of the day her own.And then for a time he forgot Brenda again in the interests of his work, and the distraction of new friendships made under the auspices of Macfarlane, an engineering acquaintance resident in Cape Town. There was a man from Port Elizabeth, named Aplin, whom he met first at the docks and with whom he became rather intimate. Aplin was round visiting his people; and there were two pretty cousins whom he took about who evinced a quite flattering interest in Matheson, and invited him to tennis and tea, and met him on occasions by agreement in town in the middle of the morning for ices and coffee. They were merry, high-spirited, Colonial girls, who brought just that bright touch of femininity into his life which he needed at the moment, an easy encouraging friendliness that was not intimate enough in character to set throbbing the pain of the recent hurt, but was sufficiently appreciative and competitive to be agreeable. These girls were not in the least intellectual, but they had plenty of small talk and were pleasant to look at. Matheson enjoyed going to the house. It was somewhere, to go out of working hours, where he could feel sure of a welcome and of being amused.At no period of the acquaintance did he entertain any deeper sentiment than that of friendship for either of them; but they both took a kind of proprietary interest in him and let him see it. At the same time they showed a similar interest in Aplin, and one or two men who frequented their tennis court. They were quite frankly matrimonial in intention. Their limited and rather commonplace lives shaped them for the one inevitable destiny, failing which there was no resource, no visible outlet.“You go out there a good deal,” Macfarlane warned him one Saturday, meeting him on the tram for Rondebosch with a racquet under his arm. “You’ll be engaged before you know where you are.” He laughed, a jolly good-natured laugh. “They tried to catch me at one time. It’s Rosie you had better be careful of.”When Matheson reached the house and entered the garden he saw Rosie in the path, stooping over a flower-border. He had met her like this before and believed the encounter accidental, but Macfarlane’s words, coming back to him, illumined his understanding. Rosie turned with a little start and straightened herself and came towards him. She looked quite pretty and entirely unconscious, and she held some blue flower in her hand the name of which he did not know.“How nice!” she said. “I didn’t guess it was you when I heard the gate. I was picking flowers.”She held the sample one up to him as evidence of her occupation.“You shall wear it in your buttonhole. It matches your eyes.”He stood while she pinned it in for him, and found some difficulty in keeping the amusement out of the eyes which matched with her flower. She stepped back to admire the effect of her handiwork and flashed a coquettish glance at him, and then returned to admiring the effect.“That’s awfully kind of you,” he said. “I feel tremendously smart.”“You look festive,” she admitted. “Blue suits you. I’m glad I happened to be in the garden when you arrived.”There was only one obvious reply to this obvious speech. Matheson made it perfunctorily.“It is I who have the greater reason to be glad,” he said. “I don’t think any one has ever given me a flower before—certainly no one else has been kind enough to pin one in my coat.”“I’m glad I’m the first,” she said, and flashed another look at him, and walked on by his side. “I am not considered generous with my favours,” she added mendaciously... “but the colour of the flower suggested you. I like blue eyes.”Matheson laughed at that.“I prefer brown eyes,” he said, and was amused at the smiling satisfaction of the brunette face close to his shoulder.“Well, of course,” she returned, “one usually admires opposite colouring. That’s only natural.”Her speech somehow set him thinking of the fairest face he had ever seen. The picture of that fair face framed in the sunlit hair, with the dark woodwork of the old room for a background, was so vividly before him that it was not surprising his attention wandered from the empty little person at his side, whose flow of frivolous chatter went on uninterruptedly, and covered while it did not disguise the fact that he had grown suddenly dull. Then May appeared unexpectedly from behind some flowering shrubs, and took charge of him and conducted him to the tennis court, where Aplin and another man were playing singles, while Mrs Aplin sat in a rustic summer-house overlooking the court, a self-effacing chaperon, beaming complacently upon the young people, with an indulgent eye lit with maternal pride for her girls. There were no other girls present. As Rosie explained, if they invited too many people they never got any play themselves.It was all very jolly and homelike, Matheson considered. He played with both girls in turn. May lit a cigarette for him between the sets, and Mrs Aplin fussed over him during tea, and was confidential with him later in regard to her daughters’ tastes and accomplishments and general amiability.“They are such favourites withevery one,” she confided with emphatic earnestness. “A friend whose girls are not popular asked me recently the secret of my training... what plans I adopted in bringing my girls up that made them so generally liked? I told her that I had brought them up to play games.” She regarded Matheson quite seriously, with a gleam of satisfaction in her eyes. “They play games... every game...well. What more is required of a girl? All this nonsense about higher education... It’s so unnecessary. And study is bad for the eyes; it makes girls frown; and a girl with a frown doesn’t look so much studious as bad tempered. Let them play games and look nice; that’s all that is requisite.”“It’s the sort of idea I started out with,” Matheson returned, beating his tennis boot softly with his racquet and idly watching the pipe-clay rise in little clouds. He laughed suddenly. “I don’t know about looking nice, but I had a fancy for playing games. Life itself seemed a game. But it isn’t. And playing games doesn’t provide one with a banking account.”“Of course it’s different for men. I don’t advocate games forevery one,” she assured him gravely. “But girls don’t need to think about banking accounts.”“Some of them must,” he said.She looked at him in surprise.“I wasn’t speaking ofthatsort of girl; I meant my own girls,” she answered in a tone that opened up all the social distances before Matheson’s amazed vision.“I think responsibilityunsexesa woman,” she added; and her bewildered listener felt that the final nail had been driven into the coffin containing the discredited remains of the girl-worker’s claim to respectability.That was the tone of the Rondebosch household; and the head of the house, whose flourishing business made this comfortable despite of everything save leisure possible to his womenkind, showed his appreciation of their views by spending as little time under his roof-tree as was compatible with his position in relation to the family. Matheson had met Mr Aplin only once when he dined at the house. Macfarlane called him morose, but Matheson rather liked the silent, heavy, bored-looking man whose presence his wife and daughters managed to eclipse.“It was seeing the old man among them scared me off,” Macfarlane informed him. “Any man who marries one of them can look forward to becoming like that. He’s a cipher in the house. They do well to keep him in the background as a rule. But there’s lots of money. If a man isn’t particular in other respects... there you are.”Money undoubtedly swelled the train of the Aplin girls’ admirers; but it was not a sufficiently powerful magnet to attract Matheson. As he explained one day in a burst of confidence to Macfarlane, he could not dispense altogether with brains in a life-partner.“They are pretty,” he allowed,—“and jolly nice to talk with for an afternoon, but they have no more intelligence than kittens. Imagine how fed up a man would get! And looks don’t last. Though, apart from that, I’d grow weary to death of the inanity long before the looks were faded. I want more than either of them could give from my wife.”“Well, I don’t know,” Macfarlane returned lazily, “that I’m so keen on matrimony. A man has a lot better time while he’s single.”“That’s all very well,” Matheson argued; “but the world can’t be run on those lines. I mean to marry. I want to have a wife and children and some stake in the country.”“You’re going ahead a bit,” Macfarlane laughed. “What’s changed you? You weren’t keen on responsibilities at one time... You are changed, Matheson. You’ve changed a lot during the last few months... A girl—eh?”“A girl—yes.”Matheson was silent for a moment or so; and the other man, observing him closely, drew his own conclusions from his gloomy face.“That’s past and done with though. She hasn’t any part in this. I want to marry... It has nothing to do with being in love. I’ve been thinking about things... getting hold of a sort of idea of what my special job in life is. I am going to colonise—in earnest. I’m going to own land in the country, and raise a family on it if it’s possible, and try for a seat in the Legislative Assembly and have a voice in matters.” He looked up, met Macfarlane’s astonished, questioning eye, and smiled drily. “You think I’m talking over my hat,” he said.“I think you are taking on something of a job,” was all Macfarlane vouchsafed.They were seated after dinner in a quiet corner of Macfarlane’s stoep which fronted his small bachelor bungalow. It was a Sunday afternoon, warm and still, and until their present conversation roused them from their lethargy they had both seemed more inclined to drowse than talk. Matheson, who was smoking, threw away his cigarette in order to give his whole attention to his subject.“I was on a Dutch farm before I came down,” he said, “staying among Dutch people—some of the disaffected Dutch—”“There are a good many of that breed,” Macfarlane interposed.“They’ve got a case,” Matheson said.“Oh! they’ve got a case,” Macfarlane allowed—“but it’s against their own interests to insist upon it. The men with brains recognise that. It’s among the more ignorant Boers that the disaffection spreads. I don’t fancy it is worth worrying over.”“Possibly not. But it’s always desirable to stop the spread of contagious disease.”“What remedy have you to propose?” Macfarlane inquired.“Tact. I’m of the opinion that it is because most of us refuse to recognise their case that the ill feeling spreads. I’ve talked with them... It’s a real sense of injustice at the back of their minds that rankles. They aren’t all of them actuated by blind hatred.”Macfarlane looked doubtful.“Well, there may have been injustice,” he allowed. “But the position out here was impossible, as any one who wasn’t a sentimentalist would acknowledge. After all, it’s a British Colony, and there wasn’t room for a rival power. We paid hard cash for the privilege of settling, and our right received international recognition. We’ve done more for the development of South Africa than the Boers ever could. If they owned the country some greater power would step in and take it from them. They aren’t, you see, a nation.”“They are a nation in the making,” Matheson rejoined, thinking of Nel’s words. “They are going to be a power in the country.”“Why not? There’s room for all of us under the one flag.”Matheson was silent for a while, thinking. Presently he said:“There’s ill work—underhand work going on. I’ve come in touch with it. There’s a German I know, who passes for an Englishman, who is deliberately fostering the spirit of rebellion among the Boers.”“I dare say. The Germans played dirty tricks with the Boers during the late war. But if it came to a head,” Macfarlane answered comfortably, “it would be only a half-hearted rebellion. That spirit isn’t general.”“No. But it has crossed my mind to wonder whether there is something behind this—something we aren’t expecting. Europe seems settled and peaceably inclined, but... Suppose there should be something brewing?”Macfarlane sat up and looked at him queerly.“It’s odd you should say that,” he remarked. “It was only last week Aplin was commenting on the German exodus from Port Elizabeth. For the past two years they have been leaving for Europe, all the influential Germans. They have any amount of German firms there, and the beggars are all clearing out.” He laughed suddenly. “Oh, rats!” he cried. “You are making me fanciful. I should advise you to quit staying on Dutch farms. You stick to engineering, my boy, and give over philosophising on love and war.”“I’m going to talk with Aplin about this,” Matheson said. “I’d like to hear what he has to say.”“Oh! he’ll play up to you all right. There’s a German round his way who puts his back up with his incessant peace talk. He has ideas for a federation of nations to enforce peace on the world. That idea, according to Aplin, is aggressive; no principle can be peaceful that needs to be enforced.”“One can argue down anything with that kind of sophistry,” Matheson contended. “But there is something in the idea.”“Yes—if the beggar’s sincere. But something of that nature appeared in a magazine a little while back. For myself, I’d like to know where it originated. I’m not much of a believer in any German made article. The German may talk brotherly love; but he never has loved his neighbour, and he never will. Look at their Colonies. None but Germans can live under their flag. And then look at Cape Town—bar America, it is the most cosmopolitan city in the world. So much for that!” he said, and lighted himself another cigarette. “I discredit equally their peace palaver and your predicted rebellion. If rebellion does come, we’ve got a man at the head of affairs—and he’s a Dutchman, mind you—who will be equal to dealing with it.”“He knows how to deal with strikers anyhow,” Matheson said, and laughed.

The meeting with Holman and the latter’s reference to the girl of the beach brought Matheson’s memory with a swing back to Brenda and his promise to her. In all these weeks he had not thought of her twice, nor looked at the address she had given him at his request. He took it out when he got back to his rooms, and considered the wisdom of writing to her in a calm, detached way, and with a view to possible developments.

Finally he decided that he would write, and did so, asking for news of her. He despatched his letter, and waited in a state of curious uncertainty for her reply. When the reply did not come this uncertainty as to the real state of his wishes yielded to a very genuine disappointment. It was no longer a matter of indifference to him; he wanted to hear from her, wanted her friendship.

Some months later, after he was back in Cape Town, his own letter was returned to him through the post office, with the unsatisfactory information pencilled upon it. “Gone away, address not known.” He had waited too long; it was not possible now to get into touch with her.

He was sorry for this. He found himself wondering why she had left Mrs Graham, where she had gone. He worried about her. It was not easy to put his anxiety into words, but he had a feeling, strengthened possibly by the fact that she had left no address behind, that the loss of her former post was in the nature of a disaster. It couldn’t, he reflected uneasily, be consequent on that moonlight walk... She had so feared being late, and he had displayed impatience at having to hasten. Perhaps after all she had been late... It was beastly unjust that a little thing like that should have such disproportionate results. He wondered why women didn’t combine and insist upon fairer conditions. Even a companion should be privileged to count certain hours of the day her own.

And then for a time he forgot Brenda again in the interests of his work, and the distraction of new friendships made under the auspices of Macfarlane, an engineering acquaintance resident in Cape Town. There was a man from Port Elizabeth, named Aplin, whom he met first at the docks and with whom he became rather intimate. Aplin was round visiting his people; and there were two pretty cousins whom he took about who evinced a quite flattering interest in Matheson, and invited him to tennis and tea, and met him on occasions by agreement in town in the middle of the morning for ices and coffee. They were merry, high-spirited, Colonial girls, who brought just that bright touch of femininity into his life which he needed at the moment, an easy encouraging friendliness that was not intimate enough in character to set throbbing the pain of the recent hurt, but was sufficiently appreciative and competitive to be agreeable. These girls were not in the least intellectual, but they had plenty of small talk and were pleasant to look at. Matheson enjoyed going to the house. It was somewhere, to go out of working hours, where he could feel sure of a welcome and of being amused.

At no period of the acquaintance did he entertain any deeper sentiment than that of friendship for either of them; but they both took a kind of proprietary interest in him and let him see it. At the same time they showed a similar interest in Aplin, and one or two men who frequented their tennis court. They were quite frankly matrimonial in intention. Their limited and rather commonplace lives shaped them for the one inevitable destiny, failing which there was no resource, no visible outlet.

“You go out there a good deal,” Macfarlane warned him one Saturday, meeting him on the tram for Rondebosch with a racquet under his arm. “You’ll be engaged before you know where you are.” He laughed, a jolly good-natured laugh. “They tried to catch me at one time. It’s Rosie you had better be careful of.”

When Matheson reached the house and entered the garden he saw Rosie in the path, stooping over a flower-border. He had met her like this before and believed the encounter accidental, but Macfarlane’s words, coming back to him, illumined his understanding. Rosie turned with a little start and straightened herself and came towards him. She looked quite pretty and entirely unconscious, and she held some blue flower in her hand the name of which he did not know.

“How nice!” she said. “I didn’t guess it was you when I heard the gate. I was picking flowers.”

She held the sample one up to him as evidence of her occupation.

“You shall wear it in your buttonhole. It matches your eyes.”

He stood while she pinned it in for him, and found some difficulty in keeping the amusement out of the eyes which matched with her flower. She stepped back to admire the effect of her handiwork and flashed a coquettish glance at him, and then returned to admiring the effect.

“That’s awfully kind of you,” he said. “I feel tremendously smart.”

“You look festive,” she admitted. “Blue suits you. I’m glad I happened to be in the garden when you arrived.”

There was only one obvious reply to this obvious speech. Matheson made it perfunctorily.

“It is I who have the greater reason to be glad,” he said. “I don’t think any one has ever given me a flower before—certainly no one else has been kind enough to pin one in my coat.”

“I’m glad I’m the first,” she said, and flashed another look at him, and walked on by his side. “I am not considered generous with my favours,” she added mendaciously... “but the colour of the flower suggested you. I like blue eyes.”

Matheson laughed at that.

“I prefer brown eyes,” he said, and was amused at the smiling satisfaction of the brunette face close to his shoulder.

“Well, of course,” she returned, “one usually admires opposite colouring. That’s only natural.”

Her speech somehow set him thinking of the fairest face he had ever seen. The picture of that fair face framed in the sunlit hair, with the dark woodwork of the old room for a background, was so vividly before him that it was not surprising his attention wandered from the empty little person at his side, whose flow of frivolous chatter went on uninterruptedly, and covered while it did not disguise the fact that he had grown suddenly dull. Then May appeared unexpectedly from behind some flowering shrubs, and took charge of him and conducted him to the tennis court, where Aplin and another man were playing singles, while Mrs Aplin sat in a rustic summer-house overlooking the court, a self-effacing chaperon, beaming complacently upon the young people, with an indulgent eye lit with maternal pride for her girls. There were no other girls present. As Rosie explained, if they invited too many people they never got any play themselves.

It was all very jolly and homelike, Matheson considered. He played with both girls in turn. May lit a cigarette for him between the sets, and Mrs Aplin fussed over him during tea, and was confidential with him later in regard to her daughters’ tastes and accomplishments and general amiability.

“They are such favourites withevery one,” she confided with emphatic earnestness. “A friend whose girls are not popular asked me recently the secret of my training... what plans I adopted in bringing my girls up that made them so generally liked? I told her that I had brought them up to play games.” She regarded Matheson quite seriously, with a gleam of satisfaction in her eyes. “They play games... every game...well. What more is required of a girl? All this nonsense about higher education... It’s so unnecessary. And study is bad for the eyes; it makes girls frown; and a girl with a frown doesn’t look so much studious as bad tempered. Let them play games and look nice; that’s all that is requisite.”

“It’s the sort of idea I started out with,” Matheson returned, beating his tennis boot softly with his racquet and idly watching the pipe-clay rise in little clouds. He laughed suddenly. “I don’t know about looking nice, but I had a fancy for playing games. Life itself seemed a game. But it isn’t. And playing games doesn’t provide one with a banking account.”

“Of course it’s different for men. I don’t advocate games forevery one,” she assured him gravely. “But girls don’t need to think about banking accounts.”

“Some of them must,” he said.

She looked at him in surprise.

“I wasn’t speaking ofthatsort of girl; I meant my own girls,” she answered in a tone that opened up all the social distances before Matheson’s amazed vision.

“I think responsibilityunsexesa woman,” she added; and her bewildered listener felt that the final nail had been driven into the coffin containing the discredited remains of the girl-worker’s claim to respectability.

That was the tone of the Rondebosch household; and the head of the house, whose flourishing business made this comfortable despite of everything save leisure possible to his womenkind, showed his appreciation of their views by spending as little time under his roof-tree as was compatible with his position in relation to the family. Matheson had met Mr Aplin only once when he dined at the house. Macfarlane called him morose, but Matheson rather liked the silent, heavy, bored-looking man whose presence his wife and daughters managed to eclipse.

“It was seeing the old man among them scared me off,” Macfarlane informed him. “Any man who marries one of them can look forward to becoming like that. He’s a cipher in the house. They do well to keep him in the background as a rule. But there’s lots of money. If a man isn’t particular in other respects... there you are.”

Money undoubtedly swelled the train of the Aplin girls’ admirers; but it was not a sufficiently powerful magnet to attract Matheson. As he explained one day in a burst of confidence to Macfarlane, he could not dispense altogether with brains in a life-partner.

“They are pretty,” he allowed,—“and jolly nice to talk with for an afternoon, but they have no more intelligence than kittens. Imagine how fed up a man would get! And looks don’t last. Though, apart from that, I’d grow weary to death of the inanity long before the looks were faded. I want more than either of them could give from my wife.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Macfarlane returned lazily, “that I’m so keen on matrimony. A man has a lot better time while he’s single.”

“That’s all very well,” Matheson argued; “but the world can’t be run on those lines. I mean to marry. I want to have a wife and children and some stake in the country.”

“You’re going ahead a bit,” Macfarlane laughed. “What’s changed you? You weren’t keen on responsibilities at one time... You are changed, Matheson. You’ve changed a lot during the last few months... A girl—eh?”

“A girl—yes.”

Matheson was silent for a moment or so; and the other man, observing him closely, drew his own conclusions from his gloomy face.

“That’s past and done with though. She hasn’t any part in this. I want to marry... It has nothing to do with being in love. I’ve been thinking about things... getting hold of a sort of idea of what my special job in life is. I am going to colonise—in earnest. I’m going to own land in the country, and raise a family on it if it’s possible, and try for a seat in the Legislative Assembly and have a voice in matters.” He looked up, met Macfarlane’s astonished, questioning eye, and smiled drily. “You think I’m talking over my hat,” he said.

“I think you are taking on something of a job,” was all Macfarlane vouchsafed.

They were seated after dinner in a quiet corner of Macfarlane’s stoep which fronted his small bachelor bungalow. It was a Sunday afternoon, warm and still, and until their present conversation roused them from their lethargy they had both seemed more inclined to drowse than talk. Matheson, who was smoking, threw away his cigarette in order to give his whole attention to his subject.

“I was on a Dutch farm before I came down,” he said, “staying among Dutch people—some of the disaffected Dutch—”

“There are a good many of that breed,” Macfarlane interposed.

“They’ve got a case,” Matheson said.

“Oh! they’ve got a case,” Macfarlane allowed—“but it’s against their own interests to insist upon it. The men with brains recognise that. It’s among the more ignorant Boers that the disaffection spreads. I don’t fancy it is worth worrying over.”

“Possibly not. But it’s always desirable to stop the spread of contagious disease.”

“What remedy have you to propose?” Macfarlane inquired.

“Tact. I’m of the opinion that it is because most of us refuse to recognise their case that the ill feeling spreads. I’ve talked with them... It’s a real sense of injustice at the back of their minds that rankles. They aren’t all of them actuated by blind hatred.”

Macfarlane looked doubtful.

“Well, there may have been injustice,” he allowed. “But the position out here was impossible, as any one who wasn’t a sentimentalist would acknowledge. After all, it’s a British Colony, and there wasn’t room for a rival power. We paid hard cash for the privilege of settling, and our right received international recognition. We’ve done more for the development of South Africa than the Boers ever could. If they owned the country some greater power would step in and take it from them. They aren’t, you see, a nation.”

“They are a nation in the making,” Matheson rejoined, thinking of Nel’s words. “They are going to be a power in the country.”

“Why not? There’s room for all of us under the one flag.”

Matheson was silent for a while, thinking. Presently he said:

“There’s ill work—underhand work going on. I’ve come in touch with it. There’s a German I know, who passes for an Englishman, who is deliberately fostering the spirit of rebellion among the Boers.”

“I dare say. The Germans played dirty tricks with the Boers during the late war. But if it came to a head,” Macfarlane answered comfortably, “it would be only a half-hearted rebellion. That spirit isn’t general.”

“No. But it has crossed my mind to wonder whether there is something behind this—something we aren’t expecting. Europe seems settled and peaceably inclined, but... Suppose there should be something brewing?”

Macfarlane sat up and looked at him queerly.

“It’s odd you should say that,” he remarked. “It was only last week Aplin was commenting on the German exodus from Port Elizabeth. For the past two years they have been leaving for Europe, all the influential Germans. They have any amount of German firms there, and the beggars are all clearing out.” He laughed suddenly. “Oh, rats!” he cried. “You are making me fanciful. I should advise you to quit staying on Dutch farms. You stick to engineering, my boy, and give over philosophising on love and war.”

“I’m going to talk with Aplin about this,” Matheson said. “I’d like to hear what he has to say.”

“Oh! he’ll play up to you all right. There’s a German round his way who puts his back up with his incessant peace talk. He has ideas for a federation of nations to enforce peace on the world. That idea, according to Aplin, is aggressive; no principle can be peaceful that needs to be enforced.”

“One can argue down anything with that kind of sophistry,” Matheson contended. “But there is something in the idea.”

“Yes—if the beggar’s sincere. But something of that nature appeared in a magazine a little while back. For myself, I’d like to know where it originated. I’m not much of a believer in any German made article. The German may talk brotherly love; but he never has loved his neighbour, and he never will. Look at their Colonies. None but Germans can live under their flag. And then look at Cape Town—bar America, it is the most cosmopolitan city in the world. So much for that!” he said, and lighted himself another cigarette. “I discredit equally their peace palaver and your predicted rebellion. If rebellion does come, we’ve got a man at the head of affairs—and he’s a Dutchman, mind you—who will be equal to dealing with it.”

“He knows how to deal with strikers anyhow,” Matheson said, and laughed.

Chapter Twenty Two.Whether as a result of the talk with Macfarlane, or the expiration of Aplin’s leave and his departure for Algoa Bay, Matheson’s visits to the Rondebosch household fell off in regularity. He went out for tennis when the mood inclined him, and on occasions still met the two girls at the café in the luncheon recess and ate ices with them. It was a somewhat remarkable coincidence that they were so often in the vicinity of the café he frequented at the same hour as himself; it was always an accident, and so unexpected.He came in time to look for them, and evolved a formula in response to their surprised exclamations. There were even times when he experienced a faint disappointment if they failed to appear. There were other times when, disinclined for their chatter, he dropped into a less fashionable café nearer his work and took his iced coffee in solitary enjoyment. They detected him immediately upon his new discovery diving into the small café, and followed him, and were “so surprised” when they met within to see that he too patronised this nice quiet little place.“It’s so restful,” said Rosie audibly, as they seated themselves at his suggestion at the same table. “And really the things they give you are quite good. How did you come to find it out?”“It’s handy for me, you see,” he explained. “I can’t always get off at this hour, and often I have only ten minutes. When time is limited I bolt in here.”He did not consider it necessary to admit that it was only the second time he had visited the café.“I like to try the different places,” he added, with a view to future evasion.“The girls’ dresses are pretty,” observed May, looking after the neat Puritan figure of the waitress who had served them. “They suggest the chorus in a revue.”“I dare say Mr Matheson considers that one of the attractions of the place,” Rosie threw in with a touch of malice.Matheson, who had not as a matter of fact taken particular note of the waitresses, glanced after a tall blonde girl who passed their table carrying a trayful of American drinks, and laughed.“I think they look jolly fine,” he said.May looked about her, nibbling an ice wafer.“I wouldn’t mind being a waitress in a café. They don’t have half a bad time,” she averred.“May!” Her sister appeared horrified. “The things men say to them... And imagine taking tips!”“I’d like the tips all right,” May declared, and caught Matheson’s eye and smiled. “And it’s just fascinating squirting drinks out of those syphons. It makes one cool to watch. Besides, I’d like going about in fancy dress all day, and wearing a dinky little cap. How do you think I’d lode in one of those Puritan caps, Mr Matheson?”“I think you would look sufficiently attractive to be sure of your tips,” he answered.“Flatterer!” she exclaimed, and laughed. “I shouldn’t look puritanical anyhow.”“No,” he rejoined. “I don’t believe you could.”“That sort of thing is all very well at a charity bazaar,” Rosie affirmed. “Even then, I prefer selling flowers.”“And charging extra for pinning them in the lucky purchaser’s buttonhole?” he suggested.“Come and find out whether I do that at the next bazaar,” she said.“She always does well at the flower stall,” May commented. “That’s why they ask her to serve. I don’t see much difference between charging extra for pinning in a buttonhole and taking tips.”“It’s both a form of blackmail,” Matheson asserted.“You don’t believe in tipping then?”“Oh! I believe in it—it’s too evident to be questioned; and custom, like the right of way through a person’s property, legalises most things.”“People are so much more civil when one tips them,” Rosie observed.“If they return civility, that’s value for one’s money all right. But the civility depends largely on the amount of the tip,” he said.The inference they drew from his remarks was that he inclined to meanness, and they both, under cover of searching for gloves and vanity bags, took a surreptitious interest in the proceedings that followed upon the presentation of the account which the neat Puritan waitress unobtrusively placed beside his plate, and then, even more unobtrusively, withdrew to a distance as though a tip were the last thing in the world she expected to receive or desired. He took up the check, glanced at the amount, placed sixpence on the table as unobtrusively as the Puritan girl had delivered his account, and was approaching the desk behind his gay companions when he felt a touch on his sleeve.“Your change, if you please.”In the hand which had touched his arm, lying upon the open palm, was the sixpence he had left on the table. He felt awkward as his glance fell to it; it was difficult he found to explain.“That’s all right,” he was beginning over his shoulder, and broke off embarrassed before the persistence of that outstretched determined little hand so obviously refusing his munificence.“Thanks,” he added hurriedly, and faced round. “I must have dropped it.”He looked at her as he took the coin, a little curious about her. He hadn’t noticed her when she served his party; he had been preoccupied, and she had kept in the background somehow. It flashed across his mind to wonder whether she had overheard any part of their talk, and resented his remarks about tipping. Then his eyes met hers, and the coin which he was in the act of taking slipped from his fingers and rolled away out of sight.“You!” he cried. His eager hand shot out and grasped the small one which had returned his money. “I have been trying to discover you for months. I thought I had lost you... And you’ve been here, close at hand, all the while!”A faint colour warmed the face that had lost much of its brownness, the dawn of a smile broke in the earnest eyes he had last seen raised to his in the moonlight in the shadowy road beneath the oleanders—a hint of a smile which failed to reach her lips.“I thought you had forgotten,” Brenda said.He remembered that for a time he had forgotten. It seemed incredible now, with the small warm hand in his, and the sense of comradeship which the nearness of her, the friendly light in her eyes, conveyed, that ever it had been a matter of indifference to him whether he saw her again. There was not a shadow of doubt as to his pleasure at the moment.She drew her hand away.“The management may be watching me,” she said.“Oh bother! There is always some one watching you,” he returned. “No matter! We will have our talk out where no one can watch us save the stars. It’s jolly that you’re here... I’m not going to lose sight of you again.”He arranged to meet her that evening and parted from her feeling extraordinarily dated. He looked back when he had paid his score and was passing out to smile across the room at her. Then he pushed the swing door and emerged upon the pavement to discover his late companions, rather silent and faintly displeased, waiting by the kerb for him.“Well, we can never go in there again!” Rosie said, in tones charged with inner meaning.It was so obvious that she wanted him to inquire the reason for this taboo that he did not ask it; instead he remarked cheerfully:“That’s the biggest surprise I’ve had—and about the pleasantest. I never expected to run across Miss Upton like that.”“We didn’t imagine you knew her,” May said. “When she served us I saw who it was, but of course one couldn’t speak to her. She ought not to stay in Cape Town.”“Why not?” he asked.“Oh! there’s nothing exactly against her—except of course, the connexion. Her father embezzled money and went to prison. He was in dad’s firm. We knew her quite well at one time. But it was an awful disgrace; one couldn’t go on knowing them. You must acknowledge it is impossible for us. Mother wouldn’t like us to talk to her.”“No,” he said; “I don’t suppose she would.”“You didn’t know about her father, of course,” Rosie said.“Oh! yes, I did. She told me herself—not the details, but the bald facts.”“Really! I’m surprised at that. A man doesn’t need to be so particular, perhaps; but it wouldn’t do for us to be seen talking to her.”“My friendship dates since her misfortunes,” he explained. “I can’t believe that I could have respected her more had I known her in her prosperous days. The fact that her father was imprisoned, apart from my sympathy with her on that account, doesn’t affect me. I can’t stay now, or I could talk to you for an hour on the immorality of injustice. I’ll come out to your place some day, and we’ll take it for a subject for debate.”“The things you say!” Rosie exclaimed, divided between resentment and an earnest desire to prevent a breach.They parted on less cordial terms than usual, feeling it necessary to maintain their displeasure. As May observed, Mr Matheson should be made aware that he must not obtrude his common acquaintances upon them.“As long as he keeps his shop-girls in the background I suppose it’s all right,” she said.“Men are funny animals,” was Rosie’s comment.Matheson, with his thoughts revolving round his discovery and the Aplin girls’ revelations, went to Macfarlane for information. Macfarlane, having spent ten years in Cape Town, was fairly well qualified to give it. The most interesting events in the histories of many of the inhabitants were known to him, and the Upton affair was barely five years old.He had forgotten the details of the case, he said. So far as he could remember it was just a sordid tale of common embezzlement. The man was weak—one of those people with a moral kink. There was no apparent reason why he should appropriate the firm’s money; he had a decent salary, and a decent wife who certainly never led him into extravagance. When he came out of prison he went under altogether, and the home was broken up. He had no idea what had become of the family. There was only one girl, and the boys were old enough now to be doing for themselves.“I can tell you where Miss Upton is,” Matheson said, “because I happened to know her.”He explained how and where he had met her that morning. Macfarlane was interested.“It’s a come down,” he said, “and a beastly shame. That’s the worst of it when these sort of things happen, the family goes under with the man.”“I don’t fancy there is much fear of Miss Upton going under,” Matheson returned, and became so earnest and eager in his championship as to provoke Macfarlane’s curiosity.“She is so plucky and clever... one of the bravest and honestest little souls!”“Well,” observed Macfarlane drily, “I haven’t seen her since she was an ugly little flapper with a predilection for snubbing people, and a partiality for animals. You’ll lose the chance of a marriage of convenience, my boy, if you let Rosie see you trotting her about.”Matheson laughed.“She and May were with me this morning, and both were rather scandalised at my friendship with a girl in a café,” he said.“That’s finished anyhow,” Macfarlane asserted grimly. “You’ll never be asked to stretch your legs under the old man’s mahogany again, and you won’t swagger back from tennis any more with Rosie’s favours in your coat Considering your ambitions, which you confided to me recently, I think you are playing the fool with your prospects.”“I’ve got to get there on my own,” Matheson answered. “I’ve no prejudice against my wife lending me a helping hand, but I don’t want to depend on her entirely for a leg up.”“Just so!” Macfarlane observed. “At the same time it is as well not to give her a chance of holding you back.”Which piece of advice served only as an irritant. The disparagement of one’s friends, or of one’s opinions, forces the sincere believer in either into a sturdy opposition.It was a matter of extreme gratification to Matheson that he had found Brenda Upton again. Her family history concerned him very little. She was such a good comrade. He had not realised until he rediscovered her how much he stood in need of the friendship she could give him. Friendship with a woman who is sympathetic, and young enough to be attractive as well as companionable, fills the blanks in a man’s life.He was not in love with Brenda; he realised that perfectly; but he was fond of her. If he retained from his intercourse with her none of the glowing memories he recalled in connexion with Honor, her society afforded him a quiet pleasure that was restful and satisfying. She suggested home to a man who knew no home, and peace to a restless spirit, like the calm of inland waters following a voyage in tempestuous seas. Honor had been a dream, a beautiful inspiration. This other girl possessed a charm of an altogether different quality. Already she was becoming for him a symbol of familiar and essential things.

Whether as a result of the talk with Macfarlane, or the expiration of Aplin’s leave and his departure for Algoa Bay, Matheson’s visits to the Rondebosch household fell off in regularity. He went out for tennis when the mood inclined him, and on occasions still met the two girls at the café in the luncheon recess and ate ices with them. It was a somewhat remarkable coincidence that they were so often in the vicinity of the café he frequented at the same hour as himself; it was always an accident, and so unexpected.

He came in time to look for them, and evolved a formula in response to their surprised exclamations. There were even times when he experienced a faint disappointment if they failed to appear. There were other times when, disinclined for their chatter, he dropped into a less fashionable café nearer his work and took his iced coffee in solitary enjoyment. They detected him immediately upon his new discovery diving into the small café, and followed him, and were “so surprised” when they met within to see that he too patronised this nice quiet little place.

“It’s so restful,” said Rosie audibly, as they seated themselves at his suggestion at the same table. “And really the things they give you are quite good. How did you come to find it out?”

“It’s handy for me, you see,” he explained. “I can’t always get off at this hour, and often I have only ten minutes. When time is limited I bolt in here.”

He did not consider it necessary to admit that it was only the second time he had visited the café.

“I like to try the different places,” he added, with a view to future evasion.

“The girls’ dresses are pretty,” observed May, looking after the neat Puritan figure of the waitress who had served them. “They suggest the chorus in a revue.”

“I dare say Mr Matheson considers that one of the attractions of the place,” Rosie threw in with a touch of malice.

Matheson, who had not as a matter of fact taken particular note of the waitresses, glanced after a tall blonde girl who passed their table carrying a trayful of American drinks, and laughed.

“I think they look jolly fine,” he said.

May looked about her, nibbling an ice wafer.

“I wouldn’t mind being a waitress in a café. They don’t have half a bad time,” she averred.

“May!” Her sister appeared horrified. “The things men say to them... And imagine taking tips!”

“I’d like the tips all right,” May declared, and caught Matheson’s eye and smiled. “And it’s just fascinating squirting drinks out of those syphons. It makes one cool to watch. Besides, I’d like going about in fancy dress all day, and wearing a dinky little cap. How do you think I’d lode in one of those Puritan caps, Mr Matheson?”

“I think you would look sufficiently attractive to be sure of your tips,” he answered.

“Flatterer!” she exclaimed, and laughed. “I shouldn’t look puritanical anyhow.”

“No,” he rejoined. “I don’t believe you could.”

“That sort of thing is all very well at a charity bazaar,” Rosie affirmed. “Even then, I prefer selling flowers.”

“And charging extra for pinning them in the lucky purchaser’s buttonhole?” he suggested.

“Come and find out whether I do that at the next bazaar,” she said.

“She always does well at the flower stall,” May commented. “That’s why they ask her to serve. I don’t see much difference between charging extra for pinning in a buttonhole and taking tips.”

“It’s both a form of blackmail,” Matheson asserted.

“You don’t believe in tipping then?”

“Oh! I believe in it—it’s too evident to be questioned; and custom, like the right of way through a person’s property, legalises most things.”

“People are so much more civil when one tips them,” Rosie observed.

“If they return civility, that’s value for one’s money all right. But the civility depends largely on the amount of the tip,” he said.

The inference they drew from his remarks was that he inclined to meanness, and they both, under cover of searching for gloves and vanity bags, took a surreptitious interest in the proceedings that followed upon the presentation of the account which the neat Puritan waitress unobtrusively placed beside his plate, and then, even more unobtrusively, withdrew to a distance as though a tip were the last thing in the world she expected to receive or desired. He took up the check, glanced at the amount, placed sixpence on the table as unobtrusively as the Puritan girl had delivered his account, and was approaching the desk behind his gay companions when he felt a touch on his sleeve.

“Your change, if you please.”

In the hand which had touched his arm, lying upon the open palm, was the sixpence he had left on the table. He felt awkward as his glance fell to it; it was difficult he found to explain.

“That’s all right,” he was beginning over his shoulder, and broke off embarrassed before the persistence of that outstretched determined little hand so obviously refusing his munificence.

“Thanks,” he added hurriedly, and faced round. “I must have dropped it.”

He looked at her as he took the coin, a little curious about her. He hadn’t noticed her when she served his party; he had been preoccupied, and she had kept in the background somehow. It flashed across his mind to wonder whether she had overheard any part of their talk, and resented his remarks about tipping. Then his eyes met hers, and the coin which he was in the act of taking slipped from his fingers and rolled away out of sight.

“You!” he cried. His eager hand shot out and grasped the small one which had returned his money. “I have been trying to discover you for months. I thought I had lost you... And you’ve been here, close at hand, all the while!”

A faint colour warmed the face that had lost much of its brownness, the dawn of a smile broke in the earnest eyes he had last seen raised to his in the moonlight in the shadowy road beneath the oleanders—a hint of a smile which failed to reach her lips.

“I thought you had forgotten,” Brenda said.

He remembered that for a time he had forgotten. It seemed incredible now, with the small warm hand in his, and the sense of comradeship which the nearness of her, the friendly light in her eyes, conveyed, that ever it had been a matter of indifference to him whether he saw her again. There was not a shadow of doubt as to his pleasure at the moment.

She drew her hand away.

“The management may be watching me,” she said.

“Oh bother! There is always some one watching you,” he returned. “No matter! We will have our talk out where no one can watch us save the stars. It’s jolly that you’re here... I’m not going to lose sight of you again.”

He arranged to meet her that evening and parted from her feeling extraordinarily dated. He looked back when he had paid his score and was passing out to smile across the room at her. Then he pushed the swing door and emerged upon the pavement to discover his late companions, rather silent and faintly displeased, waiting by the kerb for him.

“Well, we can never go in there again!” Rosie said, in tones charged with inner meaning.

It was so obvious that she wanted him to inquire the reason for this taboo that he did not ask it; instead he remarked cheerfully:

“That’s the biggest surprise I’ve had—and about the pleasantest. I never expected to run across Miss Upton like that.”

“We didn’t imagine you knew her,” May said. “When she served us I saw who it was, but of course one couldn’t speak to her. She ought not to stay in Cape Town.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“Oh! there’s nothing exactly against her—except of course, the connexion. Her father embezzled money and went to prison. He was in dad’s firm. We knew her quite well at one time. But it was an awful disgrace; one couldn’t go on knowing them. You must acknowledge it is impossible for us. Mother wouldn’t like us to talk to her.”

“No,” he said; “I don’t suppose she would.”

“You didn’t know about her father, of course,” Rosie said.

“Oh! yes, I did. She told me herself—not the details, but the bald facts.”

“Really! I’m surprised at that. A man doesn’t need to be so particular, perhaps; but it wouldn’t do for us to be seen talking to her.”

“My friendship dates since her misfortunes,” he explained. “I can’t believe that I could have respected her more had I known her in her prosperous days. The fact that her father was imprisoned, apart from my sympathy with her on that account, doesn’t affect me. I can’t stay now, or I could talk to you for an hour on the immorality of injustice. I’ll come out to your place some day, and we’ll take it for a subject for debate.”

“The things you say!” Rosie exclaimed, divided between resentment and an earnest desire to prevent a breach.

They parted on less cordial terms than usual, feeling it necessary to maintain their displeasure. As May observed, Mr Matheson should be made aware that he must not obtrude his common acquaintances upon them.

“As long as he keeps his shop-girls in the background I suppose it’s all right,” she said.

“Men are funny animals,” was Rosie’s comment.

Matheson, with his thoughts revolving round his discovery and the Aplin girls’ revelations, went to Macfarlane for information. Macfarlane, having spent ten years in Cape Town, was fairly well qualified to give it. The most interesting events in the histories of many of the inhabitants were known to him, and the Upton affair was barely five years old.

He had forgotten the details of the case, he said. So far as he could remember it was just a sordid tale of common embezzlement. The man was weak—one of those people with a moral kink. There was no apparent reason why he should appropriate the firm’s money; he had a decent salary, and a decent wife who certainly never led him into extravagance. When he came out of prison he went under altogether, and the home was broken up. He had no idea what had become of the family. There was only one girl, and the boys were old enough now to be doing for themselves.

“I can tell you where Miss Upton is,” Matheson said, “because I happened to know her.”

He explained how and where he had met her that morning. Macfarlane was interested.

“It’s a come down,” he said, “and a beastly shame. That’s the worst of it when these sort of things happen, the family goes under with the man.”

“I don’t fancy there is much fear of Miss Upton going under,” Matheson returned, and became so earnest and eager in his championship as to provoke Macfarlane’s curiosity.

“She is so plucky and clever... one of the bravest and honestest little souls!”

“Well,” observed Macfarlane drily, “I haven’t seen her since she was an ugly little flapper with a predilection for snubbing people, and a partiality for animals. You’ll lose the chance of a marriage of convenience, my boy, if you let Rosie see you trotting her about.”

Matheson laughed.

“She and May were with me this morning, and both were rather scandalised at my friendship with a girl in a café,” he said.

“That’s finished anyhow,” Macfarlane asserted grimly. “You’ll never be asked to stretch your legs under the old man’s mahogany again, and you won’t swagger back from tennis any more with Rosie’s favours in your coat Considering your ambitions, which you confided to me recently, I think you are playing the fool with your prospects.”

“I’ve got to get there on my own,” Matheson answered. “I’ve no prejudice against my wife lending me a helping hand, but I don’t want to depend on her entirely for a leg up.”

“Just so!” Macfarlane observed. “At the same time it is as well not to give her a chance of holding you back.”

Which piece of advice served only as an irritant. The disparagement of one’s friends, or of one’s opinions, forces the sincere believer in either into a sturdy opposition.

It was a matter of extreme gratification to Matheson that he had found Brenda Upton again. Her family history concerned him very little. She was such a good comrade. He had not realised until he rediscovered her how much he stood in need of the friendship she could give him. Friendship with a woman who is sympathetic, and young enough to be attractive as well as companionable, fills the blanks in a man’s life.

He was not in love with Brenda; he realised that perfectly; but he was fond of her. If he retained from his intercourse with her none of the glowing memories he recalled in connexion with Honor, her society afforded him a quiet pleasure that was restful and satisfying. She suggested home to a man who knew no home, and peace to a restless spirit, like the calm of inland waters following a voyage in tempestuous seas. Honor had been a dream, a beautiful inspiration. This other girl possessed a charm of an altogether different quality. Already she was becoming for him a symbol of familiar and essential things.

Chapter Twenty Three.Matheson dressed early for his meeting with Brenda, dressed with unusual care. A strange excitement held him. The renewal of this friendship meant more to him than its beginning had signified. He was proceeding towards his object with eyes open, proceeding deliberately with, he was aware, one ultimate end in view. His mind, despite its excitement, was quite steady of purpose. The complexities of life were resolving surely into a quite simple exposition of the human requirement. He had reached the stage when a man knows what it is he wants and is bent upon its attainment.He met Brenda at the tramway. She wore a dark, rather shabby, coat and skirt, and she was manifestly shy. They climbed to the top of the tram, and for the first half-mile of the journey neither of them found much to say. The tram was fairly full, and the proximity of strangers made talking difficult for people who had nothing of a conventional nature to say to one another.When they got down at the terminus he tucked her hand within his arm and started to walk quickly, drawing a long breath of relief when they left the tram lines and the remaining passengers behind and faced the sea.“Time rolls back,” he said. “This is just like it was in the summer.”“Yes,” she agreed; “only the satisfying warmth of summer has gone.”There was something pathetic in her way of saying this; it was as though she lamented not only the summer’s geniality, but the satisfying warmth of their comradeship. He gripped her hand tightly, and looked down into the serious face.“What have you been doing since I left you here—so jealously guarded? I thought I had lost you altogether. I wrote, but my letter came back to me.”“Did you write?” Her eyes met his with a light of gladness in them. “I thought—that was only talk.”“Did you?” His manner was faintly reproachful. “I had no idea you would leave Mrs Graham so soon, or I’d have written before.”Brenda suddenly smiled.“Neither had I,” she said. “It was not exactly voluntary.”“You don’t mean,” he began quickly, and stopped, regarding her perplexedly. “I’ve wondered,” he added somewhat lamely after a pause, “since getting my letter back, whether you had any trouble that night? It wasn’t, I hope, in any way due to our intercourse that you lost your post?”She laughed, and he thought her mirth the sweetest and most infectious he had ever heard. He laughed with her.“Oh Lord!” he said. “Don’t tell me it was that.”“Mrs Graham waited up for me,” she confessed, “and the others got back first and admitted I hadn’t gone with them. She was—oh! so angry... There was a man who boarded there who was sorry for me; and he secured me my present position at the café. It helped at the time, but of course it’s a step down.”“It’s a drop, yes,” he admitted. “I’m awfully sorry. You must climb again. Life is always; climbing.”“It is easier to drop a step than to climb one,” she returned.“That isn’t your philosophy really,” he insisted. “I know you have encouraged me in believing that the greater the difficulty the more exhilarating and better worth the effort is its surmounting. It’s up to you to practise what you preach.”“Ah!” she said, and her voice sounded a little weary. “I must have been a horrid little prig when I talked to you like that.”“You were never priggish,” he asserted. “But you keep a man up to the mark.”They walked on for a while in silence, and still in silence made their way down to the shore, scrambling with difficulty over the slippery rocks. When they came upon a stretch of sand he called a halt. They seated themselves close together on the sand, and he took his coat and put it about both their shoulders.“The nights turn in chilly,” he said. “Do you remember how hot it was when we sat here before?”“Yes,” she replied, and drew closer to him. “Everything seems changed,” she said,—“even you—you, perhaps, most of all.”“I know I am changed,” he allowed. “I’ve been through a good deal since I saw you...”He could not, he discovered, tell her then the nature of the thing which had changed him. He had meant to, but when he tried to express himself he could not find the words.“I’ve been through a good deal,” he repeated. He played with the cold damp sand, and his manner became more aloof, less intimate and confidential. “Life changes most of us.”“Because life hurts,” she said.He looked at her closely, recalling the bright girlishness of her when last they had talked together.“You are depressed,” he said. “I am inclined to believe that becoming a Puritan doesn’t agree with you.”She laughed a little tonelessly, and expressed the wish that she had been born a man.“A man in my position wouldn’t be serving in a café,” she explained. “If I had a profession I would work at it, and not grumble.”And then he made a clumsy remark which immediately on its utterance he would have recalled, had that been possible.“You will have a home of your own some day. That’s a woman’s rightful profession.”He felt her withdraw from him, and in the dragging silence that followed he realised his mistake. How could he tell what jangling chord his clumsy touch had set vibrating? Misfortune had played so busy a part in her life that love had had little chance.“Where are you staying?” he asked presently—“with whom?”“My mother came back to Cape Town to be with me,” she said. “We board in a little house not far from the Gardens.”“Do you think I might come to see you there?” he asked.“Of course. Mother would like to meet you. She knows all about you.”She hesitated, and then said with some embarrassment:“Before you call I ought perhaps to tell you more about ourselves...”“That isn’t necessary,” he answered quickly. “I know as much as suffices. Nothing could alter my regard for yourself anyway. I hope you believe that?”“You are very generous,” she answered, in so low and grateful a voice that he felt he wanted to comfort her in some more practical way than by mere words. Instead he said quietly:“I think you are a brave, dear little soul. Your friendship is an immense help to me. It’s the best thing that has happened to me. I’ve been back in Cape Town three months now, and I’ve come out here alone and thought about our jolly walks and missed you more than I can say. It was good to find you unexpectedly like that to-day.”Brenda glanced at him swiftly.“You came into the café last week,” she said, “and stood close to me. I could have touched you.”“Really?” he exclaimed in amaze. “Why in the name of mystery didn’t you speak to me?”“I wasn’t sure you would be pleased. I thought—perhaps you didn’t wish to see me.”“Oh Lord!” he cried, and laughed. “You—Puritan, you! As though I could be anything but pleased to see you anywhere. I don’t know how I came not to see you... But I’m eyes right generally with all those girls around. If you hadn’t returned my change—”“Your tip,” she corrected.“My tip, then.” He laughed again light-heartedly.—“I doubt I’d have noticed you at all. What made you do it?”“I don’t know. It was quite a handsome tip for a café. But I could not take it—from you.”She did not add that besides her reluctance to take his tip, she had desired to make him recognise her—had wanted to prove to her own satisfaction whether his former omission was intentional or merely the accident he now assured her it had been. She had believed it to be accidental, but at the back of her mind there had lingered a doubt; and the doubt hurt.“I don’t want you to take tips from any one,” he said. “Promise me... I don’t like the thought of your being offered tips. I don’t like to think of your serving people. It’s ridiculous, perhaps, but I would rather you were still in attendance on that immoral old woman. She was an immoral old woman. I’d like to tell her how her conduct strikes an outsider.”“I prefer the café,” Brenda said. “At least, there’s a mental freedom. Often I am tired, and frequently I am annoyed; but there’s a sort of liberty... After all, liberty is the best thing in life. And it’s good to get home at night-time,” she added on a softened note.Home consisted of one room, but in that room her mother waited for her, and that meant everything.“On the whole,” he said lightly, “you’re a lucky person. I get off at night, but I can’t get home. There’s the ocean between me and all the home I ever knew.”He described his home to her briefly, and his parentless childhood.“One day I hope to make a home of my own,” he finished reflectively, and after a brief pause proceeded to unburden himself of his ambitions to her in much the same words as he had confided them to Macfarlane. Then, drawing on his imagination, he enlarged and elaborated his schemes, almost forgetting his audience in the pleasure of thinking out and developing his views of life, evolved in the first instance from Nel’s opinions.She listened in an attentive silence, which she did not break when he ceased talking. For the life of her she could find nothing to say. It sounded so coldblooded this deliberate purpose of marriage for certain ends, with a definite idea of colonisation, and no thought, it seemed to her, of love or the needs of the girl he would single out for his purpose. She felt the keen breath of disappointment chilling her liking for him.“You don’t say anything,” he observed, slightly aggrieved. “I don’t believe you are the least interested. You don’t enter into the spirit of Empire building.”She was looking away, seaward, and the moonlight, falling upon her face, lent it a strange pallor, and revealed the soft roundness of its outline and the shadowed mystery of her eyes. Quietly, and very deliberately she turned her face towards him, and he noticed when she moved the quick, nervous beat of a tiny pulse in the bare white throat, and the faint, half-wistful smile that curved the parted lips.“Oh, Empire building!” she said indifferently. “What of the human need? ... Isn’t that more important? You are overlooking that, and yet it’s the most important thing of all. I don’t think so much of the Empire. Of course I’m patriotic; but the human need comes first.”He did not answer immediately. He looked into her eyes, puzzled and disquieted, and reflected a while. The patriotism that Honor had stirred into active being was questioned and opposed by this other girl’s quiet insistence on the claim of the individual. Was he in danger of developing into a bloodless idealist, with a limited understanding of the requirement both of the individual and of the State?So many emotions had held him of late for a space, so many thoughts had filtered through his brain and left their conflicting impressions there, that a certain confusion held possession of his mind. All the old warm impulses were subdued and dulled, and he had nothing in the place of them that was as good as the emotions he repressed. He realised that now. Something—something enveloping, stultifying and bewildering the understanding—dropped away from his soul, as a leaf drops from the tree which no longer nourishes it. He saw clearly how surely, through disappointment, he was drifting towards a hard callousness that would end inevitably in all the kindly human sensibilities becoming submerged therein and ultimately lost. He did not want that to happen. And yet he felt that he had no power to stay this drifting. The warm, generous youth of him was running back, as the sap runs back in the bark; and he was no more able to prevent this than the tree to stay the processes of nature. He had believed that he had discovered the purpose of life: now he was beginning to realise that he had discovered nothing, only lost something of worth, which he might never recover.“It’s odd,” he remarked, “how you set me thinking. I never met any one who challenged thought as you do. I believed I was on the right tack, and you immediately point out that I’ve got my values wrong. It’s like having one’s sums crossed out on the slate when one fancied the answers were correct. There’s a baffling sort of feeling about it. And you’re right, that’s the worst of it.”“It’s only your values that are wrong,” she said quietly. “If you readjust those, then the idea is fine enough.”In confiding his plans to her he had intended to prepare her for the proposal of marriage he had in contemplation, and to accustom her to the idea of marriage with a man who could never be a lover. He did not know whether she divined his purpose, but he apprehended very clearly that she would not be satisfied with that.

Matheson dressed early for his meeting with Brenda, dressed with unusual care. A strange excitement held him. The renewal of this friendship meant more to him than its beginning had signified. He was proceeding towards his object with eyes open, proceeding deliberately with, he was aware, one ultimate end in view. His mind, despite its excitement, was quite steady of purpose. The complexities of life were resolving surely into a quite simple exposition of the human requirement. He had reached the stage when a man knows what it is he wants and is bent upon its attainment.

He met Brenda at the tramway. She wore a dark, rather shabby, coat and skirt, and she was manifestly shy. They climbed to the top of the tram, and for the first half-mile of the journey neither of them found much to say. The tram was fairly full, and the proximity of strangers made talking difficult for people who had nothing of a conventional nature to say to one another.

When they got down at the terminus he tucked her hand within his arm and started to walk quickly, drawing a long breath of relief when they left the tram lines and the remaining passengers behind and faced the sea.

“Time rolls back,” he said. “This is just like it was in the summer.”

“Yes,” she agreed; “only the satisfying warmth of summer has gone.”

There was something pathetic in her way of saying this; it was as though she lamented not only the summer’s geniality, but the satisfying warmth of their comradeship. He gripped her hand tightly, and looked down into the serious face.

“What have you been doing since I left you here—so jealously guarded? I thought I had lost you altogether. I wrote, but my letter came back to me.”

“Did you write?” Her eyes met his with a light of gladness in them. “I thought—that was only talk.”

“Did you?” His manner was faintly reproachful. “I had no idea you would leave Mrs Graham so soon, or I’d have written before.”

Brenda suddenly smiled.

“Neither had I,” she said. “It was not exactly voluntary.”

“You don’t mean,” he began quickly, and stopped, regarding her perplexedly. “I’ve wondered,” he added somewhat lamely after a pause, “since getting my letter back, whether you had any trouble that night? It wasn’t, I hope, in any way due to our intercourse that you lost your post?”

She laughed, and he thought her mirth the sweetest and most infectious he had ever heard. He laughed with her.

“Oh Lord!” he said. “Don’t tell me it was that.”

“Mrs Graham waited up for me,” she confessed, “and the others got back first and admitted I hadn’t gone with them. She was—oh! so angry... There was a man who boarded there who was sorry for me; and he secured me my present position at the café. It helped at the time, but of course it’s a step down.”

“It’s a drop, yes,” he admitted. “I’m awfully sorry. You must climb again. Life is always; climbing.”

“It is easier to drop a step than to climb one,” she returned.

“That isn’t your philosophy really,” he insisted. “I know you have encouraged me in believing that the greater the difficulty the more exhilarating and better worth the effort is its surmounting. It’s up to you to practise what you preach.”

“Ah!” she said, and her voice sounded a little weary. “I must have been a horrid little prig when I talked to you like that.”

“You were never priggish,” he asserted. “But you keep a man up to the mark.”

They walked on for a while in silence, and still in silence made their way down to the shore, scrambling with difficulty over the slippery rocks. When they came upon a stretch of sand he called a halt. They seated themselves close together on the sand, and he took his coat and put it about both their shoulders.

“The nights turn in chilly,” he said. “Do you remember how hot it was when we sat here before?”

“Yes,” she replied, and drew closer to him. “Everything seems changed,” she said,—“even you—you, perhaps, most of all.”

“I know I am changed,” he allowed. “I’ve been through a good deal since I saw you...”

He could not, he discovered, tell her then the nature of the thing which had changed him. He had meant to, but when he tried to express himself he could not find the words.

“I’ve been through a good deal,” he repeated. He played with the cold damp sand, and his manner became more aloof, less intimate and confidential. “Life changes most of us.”

“Because life hurts,” she said.

He looked at her closely, recalling the bright girlishness of her when last they had talked together.

“You are depressed,” he said. “I am inclined to believe that becoming a Puritan doesn’t agree with you.”

She laughed a little tonelessly, and expressed the wish that she had been born a man.

“A man in my position wouldn’t be serving in a café,” she explained. “If I had a profession I would work at it, and not grumble.”

And then he made a clumsy remark which immediately on its utterance he would have recalled, had that been possible.

“You will have a home of your own some day. That’s a woman’s rightful profession.”

He felt her withdraw from him, and in the dragging silence that followed he realised his mistake. How could he tell what jangling chord his clumsy touch had set vibrating? Misfortune had played so busy a part in her life that love had had little chance.

“Where are you staying?” he asked presently—“with whom?”

“My mother came back to Cape Town to be with me,” she said. “We board in a little house not far from the Gardens.”

“Do you think I might come to see you there?” he asked.

“Of course. Mother would like to meet you. She knows all about you.”

She hesitated, and then said with some embarrassment:

“Before you call I ought perhaps to tell you more about ourselves...”

“That isn’t necessary,” he answered quickly. “I know as much as suffices. Nothing could alter my regard for yourself anyway. I hope you believe that?”

“You are very generous,” she answered, in so low and grateful a voice that he felt he wanted to comfort her in some more practical way than by mere words. Instead he said quietly:

“I think you are a brave, dear little soul. Your friendship is an immense help to me. It’s the best thing that has happened to me. I’ve been back in Cape Town three months now, and I’ve come out here alone and thought about our jolly walks and missed you more than I can say. It was good to find you unexpectedly like that to-day.”

Brenda glanced at him swiftly.

“You came into the café last week,” she said, “and stood close to me. I could have touched you.”

“Really?” he exclaimed in amaze. “Why in the name of mystery didn’t you speak to me?”

“I wasn’t sure you would be pleased. I thought—perhaps you didn’t wish to see me.”

“Oh Lord!” he cried, and laughed. “You—Puritan, you! As though I could be anything but pleased to see you anywhere. I don’t know how I came not to see you... But I’m eyes right generally with all those girls around. If you hadn’t returned my change—”

“Your tip,” she corrected.

“My tip, then.” He laughed again light-heartedly.—“I doubt I’d have noticed you at all. What made you do it?”

“I don’t know. It was quite a handsome tip for a café. But I could not take it—from you.”

She did not add that besides her reluctance to take his tip, she had desired to make him recognise her—had wanted to prove to her own satisfaction whether his former omission was intentional or merely the accident he now assured her it had been. She had believed it to be accidental, but at the back of her mind there had lingered a doubt; and the doubt hurt.

“I don’t want you to take tips from any one,” he said. “Promise me... I don’t like the thought of your being offered tips. I don’t like to think of your serving people. It’s ridiculous, perhaps, but I would rather you were still in attendance on that immoral old woman. She was an immoral old woman. I’d like to tell her how her conduct strikes an outsider.”

“I prefer the café,” Brenda said. “At least, there’s a mental freedom. Often I am tired, and frequently I am annoyed; but there’s a sort of liberty... After all, liberty is the best thing in life. And it’s good to get home at night-time,” she added on a softened note.

Home consisted of one room, but in that room her mother waited for her, and that meant everything.

“On the whole,” he said lightly, “you’re a lucky person. I get off at night, but I can’t get home. There’s the ocean between me and all the home I ever knew.”

He described his home to her briefly, and his parentless childhood.

“One day I hope to make a home of my own,” he finished reflectively, and after a brief pause proceeded to unburden himself of his ambitions to her in much the same words as he had confided them to Macfarlane. Then, drawing on his imagination, he enlarged and elaborated his schemes, almost forgetting his audience in the pleasure of thinking out and developing his views of life, evolved in the first instance from Nel’s opinions.

She listened in an attentive silence, which she did not break when he ceased talking. For the life of her she could find nothing to say. It sounded so coldblooded this deliberate purpose of marriage for certain ends, with a definite idea of colonisation, and no thought, it seemed to her, of love or the needs of the girl he would single out for his purpose. She felt the keen breath of disappointment chilling her liking for him.

“You don’t say anything,” he observed, slightly aggrieved. “I don’t believe you are the least interested. You don’t enter into the spirit of Empire building.”

She was looking away, seaward, and the moonlight, falling upon her face, lent it a strange pallor, and revealed the soft roundness of its outline and the shadowed mystery of her eyes. Quietly, and very deliberately she turned her face towards him, and he noticed when she moved the quick, nervous beat of a tiny pulse in the bare white throat, and the faint, half-wistful smile that curved the parted lips.

“Oh, Empire building!” she said indifferently. “What of the human need? ... Isn’t that more important? You are overlooking that, and yet it’s the most important thing of all. I don’t think so much of the Empire. Of course I’m patriotic; but the human need comes first.”

He did not answer immediately. He looked into her eyes, puzzled and disquieted, and reflected a while. The patriotism that Honor had stirred into active being was questioned and opposed by this other girl’s quiet insistence on the claim of the individual. Was he in danger of developing into a bloodless idealist, with a limited understanding of the requirement both of the individual and of the State?

So many emotions had held him of late for a space, so many thoughts had filtered through his brain and left their conflicting impressions there, that a certain confusion held possession of his mind. All the old warm impulses were subdued and dulled, and he had nothing in the place of them that was as good as the emotions he repressed. He realised that now. Something—something enveloping, stultifying and bewildering the understanding—dropped away from his soul, as a leaf drops from the tree which no longer nourishes it. He saw clearly how surely, through disappointment, he was drifting towards a hard callousness that would end inevitably in all the kindly human sensibilities becoming submerged therein and ultimately lost. He did not want that to happen. And yet he felt that he had no power to stay this drifting. The warm, generous youth of him was running back, as the sap runs back in the bark; and he was no more able to prevent this than the tree to stay the processes of nature. He had believed that he had discovered the purpose of life: now he was beginning to realise that he had discovered nothing, only lost something of worth, which he might never recover.

“It’s odd,” he remarked, “how you set me thinking. I never met any one who challenged thought as you do. I believed I was on the right tack, and you immediately point out that I’ve got my values wrong. It’s like having one’s sums crossed out on the slate when one fancied the answers were correct. There’s a baffling sort of feeling about it. And you’re right, that’s the worst of it.”

“It’s only your values that are wrong,” she said quietly. “If you readjust those, then the idea is fine enough.”

In confiding his plans to her he had intended to prepare her for the proposal of marriage he had in contemplation, and to accustom her to the idea of marriage with a man who could never be a lover. He did not know whether she divined his purpose, but he apprehended very clearly that she would not be satisfied with that.

Chapter Twenty Four.Matheson made Mrs Upton’s acquaintance on the following Sunday. He called at the boarding house and had tea in the shabby general sitting-room, and allowed himself to be drawn out by Brenda’s mother, who was plainly bent on learning all she could concerning him before and since his intimacy with her daughter.He succeeded on the whole in impressing her favourably, despite a natural prejudice she entertained against the unconventional manner in which the acquaintance had begun, and a further disapproval of the nightly excursions which Brenda made under his escort, a custom which allied itself with her present occupation but was not the custom of her class. Without a home, a girl was so handicapped. She felt their social downfall more bitterly on her daughter’s account than ever she had felt it on her own.She resembled her daughter in appearance, and also in manner. Before life had bruised her she had possibly been a very entertaining woman. She possessed still a certain charm, and had an alert way of expressing herself which appealed to the listener. Matheson was conscious primarily of an immense relief. He had rather dreaded this meeting with Brenda’s mother. Why he should have expected anything so wildly improbable he could not tell, but he had anticipated a replica of Mrs Aplin. But this little quiet-eyed woman was altogether different; and her bright way of saying the unexpected thing pleased him. If her life had known unusual distress, she had not permitted herself to go down under them, but kept a brave front to the world, hiding even from her daughter the humiliation she experienced in coming back to the place where she and her misfortunes were so well known.Brenda poured out the tea and left the talking principally to the others. She was almost nervously anxious that this man whom she already liked so well should win her mother’s approval. Mrs Upton had expressed doubts as to the desirability of this casual friendship. Matheson’s request for permission to call had done much towards mislaying these misgivings; but the ultimate decision, Brenda felt, rested with himself. She wanted him to shine, to say brilliant things; and all the while he was behaving in a perfectly correct and commonplace manner. She had not believed he could be so dull. It exasperated her. And when he rose to go he did not suggest, as she hoped he would, that they should go for a walk. Possibly, she reflected resentfully, he had other calls to make and did not want her company. It never occurred to her that he was regulating his conduct with a view to its effect upon her mother. It surprised her when he was gone to hear her mother praise in him the characteristics which she deplored.“But he wasn’t at his best,” she protested. “I never knew him to be so dull.”“He is a very interesting man,” Mrs Upton declared. “It was you who were a little dull. You scarcely spoke to him.” She laughed suddenly. “Perhaps he is one of those men who like an audience; otherwise I don’t see what he gets out of it, if you are not more eloquent alone with him than you were to-day.”“Yes, he needs an audience. He always does most of the talking,” Brenda said.After that Sunday it became a weekly custom for Matheson to call in the afternoon. Generally he took Brenda out somewhere, and when he brought her back he stayed for a chat with her mother, and occasionally had tea with them. He took them to the theatre, and to any entertainment he thought might give them pleasure. And once, despite a natural shrinking on Mrs Upton’s part to be seen in public, he persuaded them to dine with him at the Mount Nelson. That evening stuck in his memory. It was the first occasion on which he had seen Brenda in evening dress. She looked well, and was animated and almost brilliant. He felt proud to be seen with her.Mrs Upton was considerably perplexed. It was quite manifest to her that Matheson was making up his mind to propose to her daughter, if indeed it was not already made up; but she could discover in his undoubted affection for Brenda nothing of the quality of passionate love. This disturbed her. Matheson’s quiet affection seemed to her a wholly inadequate return for the devotion of the girl’s whole heart. It was no secret from her mother that Brenda was very much in love. It was the girl’s first and only love affair, and it absorbed her entirely. Should anything interpose between her love and its fulfilment the result might easily lead to a lifelong disappointment.Mrs Upton, realising this perfectly, could only stand by and watch the course of events shaping themselves to the making or the marring of her daughter’s happiness. There were times when she wished Matheson had not come into the girl’s life; though all the glamour and romance her life had known had come to her through him. She wished too that he had not been so sure of Brenda. The girl’s devotion shone in her look.But Matheson, though he had no doubt of Brenda’s love, was not so confident of winning her as her mother believed. In all the weeks of their renewed friendship he had not uttered one word of love to her, had attempted none of those affectionate familiarities he had practised during the early days of their acquaintance. The kiss she had given him in the road at their first parting was the only kiss he had received from her. Something in the girl’s manner silenced him.—It may have been that the mere knowledge that she loved him, acted as a restraint; possibly too the lukewarm quality of his own desires caused him to hesitate ere taking the irrevocable step he contemplated. He was sure of the girl’s love, but he could not feel positive as to her answer. Nor was he satisfied that perfect happiness would result from an alliance based on such inequalities of affection. She had set this doubt working in his mind, and he was powerless to determine it, or to put it aside. The matter occasioned him endless thought and worry.At times he felt like taking the plunge and leaving the doubts to resolve themselves; and then her quiet face, with the earnest eyes lit with love for him, gave him pause, and he decided to wait and allow the friendship to develop. Already it had grown deep enough to make him conscious of his need of her. The idea of letting her drop out of his life again was altogether unthinkable. She was necessary to him. He did not understand it, but he realised it perfectly. Out of the odd confection of human emotions that swayed him, his dependence on Brenda, even the inconsistent urgency of his requirement of her love, stood out and dominated the rest. He wanted her; he had no longer any doubt about that.And yet when he was alone, and at night-time, it was seldom of Brenda he thought Even when he was with her the memory of Honor thrust between them, a beautiful, intangible obstruction keeping them apart.The time came when he felt the necessity to talk to her about Honor. He did not stop to consider whether it was wise to do so; something impelled him to speak of this matter which alone formed a bar to their complete understanding. He could not, he found, ask Brenda to marry him without confiding to her something of that part of his life the influences of which intervened between them.It was on a Sunday afternoon that Matheson chose to unburden himself. He took Brenda to see the Rhodes’ Memorial—the fine unfinished work of Watts, emblematic of Rhodes’ unfinished work—for that matter, emblematic of the unfinished work of any human span.It was a day of brilliant sunshine and cool winds, such as one gets during the Cape winter, and which one can only compare with spring weather in England, or an early autumn day before the leaves fall. They went out by tram, and walked through the wonderful grounds of Groot Schuur, that magnificent home of a wealthy, ambitious, brilliant man, who dreamed of Empire expansion, and who realised a part, though never the entire dream.Silent and a little weary, they followed the broad gravelled drive to the temple where the eight bronze lions guard the steps which lead up to the lonely enshrined bust of a strong man who, for all his greatness, despite wealth and success and numberless friends, stands out a lonely figure in the history of his time.They walked up the broad stone steps and stood before the fine thoughtful face, lifelike in its quiet abstraction, gazing towards the north, as Watts’ equestrian statue of Energy gazes, through eternal sunlit spaces, across rich plains of unsurpassed beauty, towards the mountains and the remote distances of that hinterland which lies beyond them, and in which Rhodes’ hopes and thoughts were centred.It was the first time that Matheson had visited the place. Its influence upon him in the quiet grandeur, the spirit-invaded atmosphere of this spot where Rhodes in his lifetime spent so many thoughtful hours, where even now in bronze he mounted guard over this chosen place, was tremendous. It did not surprise him, on looking towards her after a pregnant silence, to see the tears standing in Brenda’s eyes. There was a greatness in the quality and the inspiration of this monument to greatness which touched the secret springs of emotion and stirred the imagination.“Let us go and sit on the seat below there, under the trees, where he used to sit,” he said.And without further speech they descended the steps and walked quietly to the plain wooden bench where Rhodes in his lifetime sat often and dreamed his big dreams, looking away through the golden haze over the limitless scene.“He was wonderful,” Brenda said... “His is the greatest name in South African history.”Matheson, looking towards the distant mountains, nodded acquiescence.“He died too soon,” he said. “That’s the worst of it... Had he lived long enough he would have linked up the south with the north. He won more territory for the Empire without bloodshed than any other man.”“And then came the Boer war...”Quickly he brought his face round and looked at her.“Well, yes,” he said. “But I don’t suppose he could help that.”“When I stand in front of his bust up there, and gaze away over this scene, and realise the greatness of him and the vastness of his ambition, I incline to believe that he could,” she said.“Yes!”Her words obviously impressed him. Involuntarily his mind travelled bade to Benfontein, to the impressions obtained from that visit, and the memory of the bitterness of racial hate he had discovered among the Dutch whom he had met.“He cherished so many schemes—too many for one man to carry out Perhaps you are right, and he neglected the finest and wisest scheme of all, that of welding together the two white races in the Colony by the closest ties of friendship and trust. One can’t determine these things now.”“He was an Empire builder,” she returned, and looked at him with a smile in her eyes. “The Empire builder inclines to overlook the great human essentials. The field of his operations is necessarily impersonal.”For a moment or so he looked back at her steadily. She was wise, this slender slip of a girl. He already entertained a profound respect for her opinion; and it occurred to him while he gazed at her, that she would be ready also of understanding, that he had less to fear in giving her his entire confidence than in holding a part, the vitally important part, back.And then abruptly he began to talk to her about Honor.“I think I ought to tell you,” he said in a slightly constrained voice, and without looking at her, “that while I was away, before I came back here, something happened to me, something of tremendous importance. I met—some one—a girl... You understand... She meant a lot to me. I fell in love. She was Dutch. She hated the British... she couldn’t forget. That stood between us—her resentment struck deeper than anything else.”He paused, and leaned forward slightly, peering into the distance.“That’s all,” he added jerkily. “I felt I would like to tell you.”She was silent for a space, watching him, seeing the strained look in the eyes staring straight ahead of him, the set lines of his mouth. One strong hand was clenched on the bench beside him; the prominent knuckles showed white. She put out her hand and covered his.“Poor dear!” she said, and repeated softly after a moment: “Poor dear! ... That explains it.”“Explains what?” he asked dully.“Explains everything I haven’t understood in you of late... Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”“I don’t know,” he answered. “I wasn’t sure, I suppose, that I ought to tell you... I’m not sure now that I’ve done well.”“Oh! yes,” she returned quickly. “I’m glad you trusted me... I’m sorry. I hate to see you hurt.”“One gets over that—in time,” he said. “I’m not going to let it swamp me.”And then abruptly he drew his hand from under hers and stood up.“They provide tea in the cottage up there,” he said. “Come along and have some.”He drew her up from the bench, and gripped her hand hard when she stood beside him, forcing a smile to his lips.“This spot stirs the emotions,” he said. “I shall always think of it as the Place of Memories...”

Matheson made Mrs Upton’s acquaintance on the following Sunday. He called at the boarding house and had tea in the shabby general sitting-room, and allowed himself to be drawn out by Brenda’s mother, who was plainly bent on learning all she could concerning him before and since his intimacy with her daughter.

He succeeded on the whole in impressing her favourably, despite a natural prejudice she entertained against the unconventional manner in which the acquaintance had begun, and a further disapproval of the nightly excursions which Brenda made under his escort, a custom which allied itself with her present occupation but was not the custom of her class. Without a home, a girl was so handicapped. She felt their social downfall more bitterly on her daughter’s account than ever she had felt it on her own.

She resembled her daughter in appearance, and also in manner. Before life had bruised her she had possibly been a very entertaining woman. She possessed still a certain charm, and had an alert way of expressing herself which appealed to the listener. Matheson was conscious primarily of an immense relief. He had rather dreaded this meeting with Brenda’s mother. Why he should have expected anything so wildly improbable he could not tell, but he had anticipated a replica of Mrs Aplin. But this little quiet-eyed woman was altogether different; and her bright way of saying the unexpected thing pleased him. If her life had known unusual distress, she had not permitted herself to go down under them, but kept a brave front to the world, hiding even from her daughter the humiliation she experienced in coming back to the place where she and her misfortunes were so well known.

Brenda poured out the tea and left the talking principally to the others. She was almost nervously anxious that this man whom she already liked so well should win her mother’s approval. Mrs Upton had expressed doubts as to the desirability of this casual friendship. Matheson’s request for permission to call had done much towards mislaying these misgivings; but the ultimate decision, Brenda felt, rested with himself. She wanted him to shine, to say brilliant things; and all the while he was behaving in a perfectly correct and commonplace manner. She had not believed he could be so dull. It exasperated her. And when he rose to go he did not suggest, as she hoped he would, that they should go for a walk. Possibly, she reflected resentfully, he had other calls to make and did not want her company. It never occurred to her that he was regulating his conduct with a view to its effect upon her mother. It surprised her when he was gone to hear her mother praise in him the characteristics which she deplored.

“But he wasn’t at his best,” she protested. “I never knew him to be so dull.”

“He is a very interesting man,” Mrs Upton declared. “It was you who were a little dull. You scarcely spoke to him.” She laughed suddenly. “Perhaps he is one of those men who like an audience; otherwise I don’t see what he gets out of it, if you are not more eloquent alone with him than you were to-day.”

“Yes, he needs an audience. He always does most of the talking,” Brenda said.

After that Sunday it became a weekly custom for Matheson to call in the afternoon. Generally he took Brenda out somewhere, and when he brought her back he stayed for a chat with her mother, and occasionally had tea with them. He took them to the theatre, and to any entertainment he thought might give them pleasure. And once, despite a natural shrinking on Mrs Upton’s part to be seen in public, he persuaded them to dine with him at the Mount Nelson. That evening stuck in his memory. It was the first occasion on which he had seen Brenda in evening dress. She looked well, and was animated and almost brilliant. He felt proud to be seen with her.

Mrs Upton was considerably perplexed. It was quite manifest to her that Matheson was making up his mind to propose to her daughter, if indeed it was not already made up; but she could discover in his undoubted affection for Brenda nothing of the quality of passionate love. This disturbed her. Matheson’s quiet affection seemed to her a wholly inadequate return for the devotion of the girl’s whole heart. It was no secret from her mother that Brenda was very much in love. It was the girl’s first and only love affair, and it absorbed her entirely. Should anything interpose between her love and its fulfilment the result might easily lead to a lifelong disappointment.

Mrs Upton, realising this perfectly, could only stand by and watch the course of events shaping themselves to the making or the marring of her daughter’s happiness. There were times when she wished Matheson had not come into the girl’s life; though all the glamour and romance her life had known had come to her through him. She wished too that he had not been so sure of Brenda. The girl’s devotion shone in her look.

But Matheson, though he had no doubt of Brenda’s love, was not so confident of winning her as her mother believed. In all the weeks of their renewed friendship he had not uttered one word of love to her, had attempted none of those affectionate familiarities he had practised during the early days of their acquaintance. The kiss she had given him in the road at their first parting was the only kiss he had received from her. Something in the girl’s manner silenced him.—It may have been that the mere knowledge that she loved him, acted as a restraint; possibly too the lukewarm quality of his own desires caused him to hesitate ere taking the irrevocable step he contemplated. He was sure of the girl’s love, but he could not feel positive as to her answer. Nor was he satisfied that perfect happiness would result from an alliance based on such inequalities of affection. She had set this doubt working in his mind, and he was powerless to determine it, or to put it aside. The matter occasioned him endless thought and worry.

At times he felt like taking the plunge and leaving the doubts to resolve themselves; and then her quiet face, with the earnest eyes lit with love for him, gave him pause, and he decided to wait and allow the friendship to develop. Already it had grown deep enough to make him conscious of his need of her. The idea of letting her drop out of his life again was altogether unthinkable. She was necessary to him. He did not understand it, but he realised it perfectly. Out of the odd confection of human emotions that swayed him, his dependence on Brenda, even the inconsistent urgency of his requirement of her love, stood out and dominated the rest. He wanted her; he had no longer any doubt about that.

And yet when he was alone, and at night-time, it was seldom of Brenda he thought Even when he was with her the memory of Honor thrust between them, a beautiful, intangible obstruction keeping them apart.

The time came when he felt the necessity to talk to her about Honor. He did not stop to consider whether it was wise to do so; something impelled him to speak of this matter which alone formed a bar to their complete understanding. He could not, he found, ask Brenda to marry him without confiding to her something of that part of his life the influences of which intervened between them.

It was on a Sunday afternoon that Matheson chose to unburden himself. He took Brenda to see the Rhodes’ Memorial—the fine unfinished work of Watts, emblematic of Rhodes’ unfinished work—for that matter, emblematic of the unfinished work of any human span.

It was a day of brilliant sunshine and cool winds, such as one gets during the Cape winter, and which one can only compare with spring weather in England, or an early autumn day before the leaves fall. They went out by tram, and walked through the wonderful grounds of Groot Schuur, that magnificent home of a wealthy, ambitious, brilliant man, who dreamed of Empire expansion, and who realised a part, though never the entire dream.

Silent and a little weary, they followed the broad gravelled drive to the temple where the eight bronze lions guard the steps which lead up to the lonely enshrined bust of a strong man who, for all his greatness, despite wealth and success and numberless friends, stands out a lonely figure in the history of his time.

They walked up the broad stone steps and stood before the fine thoughtful face, lifelike in its quiet abstraction, gazing towards the north, as Watts’ equestrian statue of Energy gazes, through eternal sunlit spaces, across rich plains of unsurpassed beauty, towards the mountains and the remote distances of that hinterland which lies beyond them, and in which Rhodes’ hopes and thoughts were centred.

It was the first time that Matheson had visited the place. Its influence upon him in the quiet grandeur, the spirit-invaded atmosphere of this spot where Rhodes in his lifetime spent so many thoughtful hours, where even now in bronze he mounted guard over this chosen place, was tremendous. It did not surprise him, on looking towards her after a pregnant silence, to see the tears standing in Brenda’s eyes. There was a greatness in the quality and the inspiration of this monument to greatness which touched the secret springs of emotion and stirred the imagination.

“Let us go and sit on the seat below there, under the trees, where he used to sit,” he said.

And without further speech they descended the steps and walked quietly to the plain wooden bench where Rhodes in his lifetime sat often and dreamed his big dreams, looking away through the golden haze over the limitless scene.

“He was wonderful,” Brenda said... “His is the greatest name in South African history.”

Matheson, looking towards the distant mountains, nodded acquiescence.

“He died too soon,” he said. “That’s the worst of it... Had he lived long enough he would have linked up the south with the north. He won more territory for the Empire without bloodshed than any other man.”

“And then came the Boer war...”

Quickly he brought his face round and looked at her.

“Well, yes,” he said. “But I don’t suppose he could help that.”

“When I stand in front of his bust up there, and gaze away over this scene, and realise the greatness of him and the vastness of his ambition, I incline to believe that he could,” she said.

“Yes!”

Her words obviously impressed him. Involuntarily his mind travelled bade to Benfontein, to the impressions obtained from that visit, and the memory of the bitterness of racial hate he had discovered among the Dutch whom he had met.

“He cherished so many schemes—too many for one man to carry out Perhaps you are right, and he neglected the finest and wisest scheme of all, that of welding together the two white races in the Colony by the closest ties of friendship and trust. One can’t determine these things now.”

“He was an Empire builder,” she returned, and looked at him with a smile in her eyes. “The Empire builder inclines to overlook the great human essentials. The field of his operations is necessarily impersonal.”

For a moment or so he looked back at her steadily. She was wise, this slender slip of a girl. He already entertained a profound respect for her opinion; and it occurred to him while he gazed at her, that she would be ready also of understanding, that he had less to fear in giving her his entire confidence than in holding a part, the vitally important part, back.

And then abruptly he began to talk to her about Honor.

“I think I ought to tell you,” he said in a slightly constrained voice, and without looking at her, “that while I was away, before I came back here, something happened to me, something of tremendous importance. I met—some one—a girl... You understand... She meant a lot to me. I fell in love. She was Dutch. She hated the British... she couldn’t forget. That stood between us—her resentment struck deeper than anything else.”

He paused, and leaned forward slightly, peering into the distance.

“That’s all,” he added jerkily. “I felt I would like to tell you.”

She was silent for a space, watching him, seeing the strained look in the eyes staring straight ahead of him, the set lines of his mouth. One strong hand was clenched on the bench beside him; the prominent knuckles showed white. She put out her hand and covered his.

“Poor dear!” she said, and repeated softly after a moment: “Poor dear! ... That explains it.”

“Explains what?” he asked dully.

“Explains everything I haven’t understood in you of late... Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. “I wasn’t sure, I suppose, that I ought to tell you... I’m not sure now that I’ve done well.”

“Oh! yes,” she returned quickly. “I’m glad you trusted me... I’m sorry. I hate to see you hurt.”

“One gets over that—in time,” he said. “I’m not going to let it swamp me.”

And then abruptly he drew his hand from under hers and stood up.

“They provide tea in the cottage up there,” he said. “Come along and have some.”

He drew her up from the bench, and gripped her hand hard when she stood beside him, forcing a smile to his lips.

“This spot stirs the emotions,” he said. “I shall always think of it as the Place of Memories...”

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