Chapter Six.

Chapter Six.On the Way to Beira.Dettington lounged moodily against the counter of Randal and Hallam’swinkel, his eyes sardonic, his mouth decorated with discontent. He was bored to the verge of suicide. Two whole days had been wasted in Umtali waiting for the convoy of waggons with all his kit on board, to arrive from Salisbury. Thirty miles off he had taken advantage of a lift offered him by a man in a trap and come on ahead. Now he was wishing himself back at the waggons instead of stuck in this place where everyone appeared to have been dead and buried for the last five years, in spite of the recent native rebellion when they had all had to leave their homes and come into laager with not enough food and ammunition to go round. Since then the Imperial troops had passed through, bent on punitive measures, and people had gone back to their homes and were dully occupied in nursing and feeding themselves into good health again.The burden of Bettington’s song of dolour was that there was no one to talk to, nothing to drink but bad whiskey at a pound a bottle, not a man who could play poker worth a tin tack, no one keen on a shoot, and not a pretty woman in sight! Driven to sitting among the piles of coloured blankets, and bags of meal, and Kaffir corn, that composed the stock-in-grade of Randal and Hallam, he grew madder and madder every minute. Not so was he accustomed to waste his good time and rare gifts.The shop was a large galvanised iron shed, lined with shelves and a counter, and stuffed with every imaginable thing on earth that had a strong smell attached to it—leather, limbo, toilet soap, paraffin, cheese, tarred rope, shoddy blankets, and tinned foods sweltering in their tins. Hallam who had been a medical student at Columbia until the examiners turned him down, was casting up the firm’s books, perched on a packing-case at the far end of the shop. Randal flannel-shirted, pipe in mouth, coatless, tieless, his fair hair in damp streaks on his forehead, sat opposite Bettington, his elbows folded on the counter before him. No one would have guessed him an old Harrovian (except Bettington who was one himself), and one who in his year had stroked for Leander, but he was at peace with all the world, in spite of a poisoned foot that kept him from leaving the premises. Nothing about him of the restless energy which characterised the blonde man burnt a bright red who sat on the other side of the counter.Vigour and vitality was in Bettington’s every line. He wore his hat slouched low, but beneath it could be discerned a shrewd grey-green eye, a nose jutting out like an insolent rock, a mouth with more than a hint of coarseness but none of weakness about it.With the crop in his hand, he smote indiscriminately at his gaitered legs or the bags of mealies and other merchandise surrounding him.“Nice country!” he muttered, giving so vicious a cut at a pile of shoddy Kaffir blankets, striped with gaudy red and yellow, that a cloud of dust ascended from it and joined all the other little cloudlets whirling and whisking through the open door from the hot and dusty street.“Youneedn’t kick—you’re leaving it,” said Randal, sucking peacefully at his pipe. “Stop beating the colour out of my blankets. I got to make my living selling them forportièresand table covers.”“No one in this hole with the spunk to get up a shoot, and half a dozen lions roaring their heads off out at Penhalonga! Oh, pot!”“Yes, it’s sad,” agreed Randal. “But the fellows round here are like Oom Paul, they haven’t lost any lions. Besides, this is the first I’ve heard of half a dozen. The nigger only reported one, and I daresay he saw that in his dreams.”Bettington became inconsequently derisive.“This would be a fine place to raise a team for the Olympian Games, I should think—or send out an expedition against the Mad Mullah—any great adventure might have birth here!”“What a fellow you are, Bettington! Haven’t you had enough excitement round Salisbury during this unholy rebellion? One would think you’d be glad of a rest!”“Rest—nothing,” said the other savagely. “Time enough to rest when I’m dead.”“You soon will be, all right,” prophesied Randal cheerfully. “You worry too much behind your face.”No similar accusation could be levelled at Eustace, commonly known as Useless Randal, and Bettington was about to intimate as much when something caused him to sit to attention. A woman had quietly entered the shop, and from a sheet of paper in her hand began to read out a list of her requirements to Hallam. It transpired that she stood in need of a tin kettle, a water bag, six tins of bully beef, six ditto of sardines, a box of biscuits, matches, sugar, tea, coffee, and plenty of condensed milk. All were to be packed in an open packing-case ready for use on a journey. Bettington listened to these instructions because he liked the sound of her voice, but he considered it out of place in Randal to sit with mouth open and ears cocked like a terrier at point.She had pretty dark bronzy hair pushed up under a sunburnt Panama; worn but well-shaped brown leather shoes; ditto gloves; and a good line to her grey linen coat. When she turned away from Hallam to look speculatively at the provisions on the shelves, Bettington caught sight of a pale haughty little profile, a small ear, and a curving cheek. It was a long while indeed since a profile had impressed him so agreeably. A slight sound, made no doubt inadvertently, with his crop, caused her to turn her head quickly in the direction of the two men, revealing for a moment a face that would more than have fulfilled the promise of its outline but for the look of weariness and disdain stamped upon it. At her glance, Randal rose upon his poisoned foot, clutched the buttonless shirt across his bosom, and bowed with grace. Bettington, whose hat had been jammed on his forehead concealing all but one arrogant eye, removed it abruptly and placed it on the counter, thus affording to anyone sufficiently interested an uninterrupted view of the sanguine complexion and well-shaped head of Africa’s most brilliant journalist.It was not quite apparent whether or not the lady availed herself of this priceless opportunity—while nodding recognition to Randal, but a faint colour showed in her cheek as she turned back to Hallam.“Please don’t forget the condensed milk,” she murmured. “And would you try and pick out the freshest looking tins, Mr Hallam? My little child lives on it, and it is very important to have it good. You know the last you had was dreadfully yellow and old.”“Yes, it was a bad lot, Mrs Stannard. I am awfully sorry, but, as you know, we couldn’t help it. We never meant to sell that consignment when we found it was bad. But Colonel Monk commandeered it for the children’s use as there was nothing better in the town.”“I know. I’m not complaining,” she said gently. “The children would have starved without it. Only I do hope you’ve got some fresher tins in now?”“Why, certainly,” Hallam waved his hand at the well-filled shelves behind him. “We’ve got plenty of everything since the troops came up. And I can vouch for the milk—it’s a first-class brand, and fresh as paint. Where are these things to be sent, Mrs Stannard? Out to your camp?”“No,” she said in a low voice; “keep them here until that convoy of waggons arrives from Salisbury—they are expected to-night, I believe—then send the box out to be put on the waggon in which I have engaged accommodation for myself and child.” Hallam looked up as if something had hit him, but she stared at him so haughtily that he dropped his eyes and applied himself to the business of adding up the bill. She paid, and with a cold nod and no further glance at the other men left the shop. Bettington, having occasion to go to the door to examine some whip thongs that hung in a bunch before the entry, saw her walking in light fleet fashion towards the Police Camp.“Shewon’t hurt the daisies,” he murmured pleasantly to himself, as he sauntered back into the shop where the two other men were neck deep in what sounded perilously like village scandal.“What do you think of that?” Hallam was inquiring with a stunned air. He had come over to Randal’s side of the shop. “She’s had enough! Going to take the baby and scoot!”“And I don’t blame her a brass button. The only wonder is she didn’t do it long ago!” Randal wore a judicial manner.“Her sister kept her from it, I guess, and lack of funds. Stannard is tight with the sinews of war. Needs them all to square his whiskey bills.”Bettington made no attempt to take part in this interesting dialogue, but listened to it very carefully and pensively.“What will Miss van Rimmel do?” Randal wondered. “Go with her?”“Not she. She’s always been dead against her sister leaving Stannard. Thinks that while there’s life there’s hope of reformation, even in such a double-dyed sheep as he is. I bet if Mrs Stannard does go,she’llstay behind and nurse Stan through—and the Doc says he’s got ’em bad this time—rats and cats and purple elephants.”“I don’t care what colour the menagerie is as long as it keeps Miss van Rimmel here.”“Me neither,” averred Hallam elegantly.They became aware of Bettington’s sardonic presence, and dropped the subject as if it burnt.“As I was saying,” remarked Randal briskly, “we had better take fifty pounds of that dried buck off that Boer. It’s the best biltong I’ve struck since I dunno when.”“Right you are!” Hallam began to write in his note book. Randal turned his attention to the thoughtful journalist.“What about your lions, Bet? Still think of going out to look for them?”Bet regarded him pensively.“So I am to have the society of a pretty lady between here and Beira?” he remarked.“You? Who said so?” Randal’s voice sounded slightly aggressive. “I suppose there are other people besides you on those waggons, Bettington?”“Yes, but no one so good-looking,” said Bettington, wrinkling his rocky nose and gazing at them with bland eyes. “Besides the only empty tent is the one on the waggon where my kit is.”The other two studied his red complexion discontentedly.“Well, you ought to be very nice to that lady,” quoth Hallam at last.“I’ll try to be,” promised Bettington earnestly. The American may or may not have been reassured, but Randal stirred uneasily.“She drew a blank in the marriage lottery, all right,” continued Hallam. “But she has a nice little kid, and a sister that could take any man in this country in tow if she cared to, but she don’t.”“Wise sister!” thought Bettington, “but I’m glad it’s notshewho’s going to Beira.” What he said was:“I should regard Stannard as more in the nature of a surprise packet with a live bomb inside it than a blank. I used to know him years ago, before drink and gambling debts drove him out of the army. How came a pretty woman like that to tie up with him?”“You can search me. I guess she hadn’t seen many other fellows.”“That was just it,” proffered Randal. “They belong to an old Huguenot family, and these girls were brought up as innocent as lambs on a farm near Worcester, and I suppose thought everything that had worn a British uniform was an angel, and every man that came from England a gentleman.”“Well, they know better now, no doubt,” remarked Bettington pleasantly, and looked at his watch. “I think I’ll go round to the Bank and see if I can decoy Johnson out to Penhalonga to-night. Sure you won’t come, Hallam?”“Can’t! Randal’s poisoned foot has me tied up here.”After the journalist had gone, Randal spoke to his partner gloomily. “Damn bad luck his going on the same trek with Mrs Stannard. She’s just rottenly unhappy enough not to care what she does, and he’s just the fellow women throw their bonnets over the mill for.”“Why, he is as ugly as Halifax!” exclaimed Hallam.“That makes nix. He’s got brains behind that lovely complexion, and women like brains.”“More likely that insolent, don’t-care-a-tinker’s-curse air of his that gets ’em,” mused the American.“He doesn’t care a tinker’s curse either. He’d walk over anybody to get his own way. He threw down the editorship of the biggest paper at the Cape because he wouldn’t take orders from the owners, and the same thing up at Salisbury. He hadn’t run theJournala month before he bust up with Max the proprietor. Refused to air Max’s politics because they weren’t his own, and went off and fought the niggers instead. Now he’s got another big job in Johannesburg. Everybody wants him till they get him. There’s no doubt he can put it all over every other journalist in South Africa.”Later, the subject of this monograph returned to the shop with a demand for .303 cartridges, and the announcement that he had got Johnson, a horse, and some boys. Remained only to get the lion, and he seemed cocksure of that.His parting injunction to Randal was to have his box of provisions put on McKinnon’s waggon if the convoy passed through before he got back, and to send out a messenger to let him know where the waggons were so that he could go straight after them without returning to Umtali.As it happened, he did not get back, and the waggons passed through that night whilst he and Johnson were lying behind a roughly constructed scherm between the Penhalonga hills. Smokeless, drinkless, oppressed by a deep and nameless silence, ears straining and guns at the cock, they were in a state of discomfort only to be suffered in the quest for glory. But the lion came at the pitch-black hour of two, and his doom was dight.They breakfasted in the grey dawn, and while the boys skinned the trophy, Johnson, who besides being a bank manager, was a gossip and something of a wit, regaled the journalist with amusing biographies of the Umtali residents. Incidentally the Stannards came before the board, and Bettington learned, among other things, that the ex-army man had been running a farm out beyond the Police Camp, that the farm was a failure, and all his wife’s money had gone in it, likewise the money of his sister-in-law; that the latter was very pretty, and Randal and Hallam only two of a dozen men who were in love with her; but that she would have none of them, preferring to devote all her time to the business of minding the Stannard baby and keeping the peace in the Stannard household. In fact, there was very little about this unpropitious ménage that Bettington did not learn, and the more he heard the more he felicitated himself upon the fact that with the oxen and veld in the state they were it would take ten good days to reach Beira. Those ten days looked good to him. Next to shooting, and fighting, and writing, he held that life had nothing more piquant to offer than the society of a pretty, disillusioned married woman. It was not so much because he was a scoundrel that he preferred them married, as because he knew himself fonder of adventure and travel and a careless life than he could ever be of a wife. Wherefore he had long ago decided that marriage was not for him. It did not follow, according tohiscode, that flirtation was not for him; only that he must eschew the society of pretty girls and devote himself to the pretty women who were safely tied up. Certainly, even in this there was a risk of finding himself laid by the heels for life; but it was less of a risk than flirtation with girls entailed.For the rest, he held with Gordon that—No game was ever yet worth a rap.For a rational man to play;Into which no accident or mishapCould possibly find a way.It was on the evening of the following day that he came upon the convoy of waggons outspanned a few miles beyond Christmas Pass—a romantic spot with a backing of velvet mountains, a foreground of rolling plain, and a three-quarter moon like a crushed pearl hanging over all. Evening fires were alight, there was clank of pan and pannikin, and pleasant savoury odours pervaded the air. Little groups of men lay upon the ground—many of them had tramped all day and were weary. Women were unpacking provision baskets and children pranced happily about the fires.In all, about forty people were travelling together down to the coast with the idea of getting away for a time from a country which during the last year had suffered the double mischance of war and cattle pest. Some of the travellers were ruined farmers, others were miners whose machinery and property had been destroyed by the natives. There were men too, who, having been wounded in the fighting, were going down to Durban or the Cape to recruit. Several families were leaving the country altogether, disheartened by the disasters they had suffered. The war was over, but on account of the existing danger of small parties being attacked by still revengeful natives, the Government had placed this convoy of waggons, with drivers and boys at the disposal of such people as were anxious to get away. The regular mail service not yet having been resumed, Bettington, in a great hurry to reach Johannesburg, had been thankful, like many another, to avail himself of this opportunity to get down-country.He picked his way through the camp, stopping only to inquire as to the whereabouts of his boy and McKinnon’s waggon; greeting an acquaintance or two; and refusing a pressing invitation to sup at the waggon of the “wounded bunch,” one of whom, an American surgeon on crutches with a bullet lodged in his hip bone, was a very good friend of his.Bettington had not joined any mess coming down from Salisbury, for he was a fellow of moods and tenses, and constant companionship bored him. Times were when he liked his society high, and times were when he preferred it low, but always he chose to seek and cull it for himself, and for that which was thrust upon him he had no use. He rather estranged people by giving the impression that he believed the world made for the special benefit of Bettington, and nothing in it quite too good for Bettington; but this arrogance of character was more assumed than real; for he had discovered that it rid him of society he did not need, and insured him against intrusion when he wanted to work, or in those dark hours which came to him as to the most self-satisfied of us when he was face to face with the fact that Bettington was no very great chalks after all, and not within a thousand miles of the fine fellow he set out to be originally.It cannot be pretended, however, that he was suffering from any such mood at this time. Quite the reverse. A man who has potted his lion overnight owns a little secret fountain of vainglory to drink at that will keep him from being thirsty for some time.He was hungry, however, and hot, and slightly footsore, for he had handed over his borrowed horse to Randal’s messenger and thereafter tramped some miles of bad road with the thermometer at something over a hundred and ten.As he approached his waggon, he became aware of a woman’s slight graceful figure sitting on a box not far off, with a little child playing at her knees. Her profile etched against the firelight, was one which, though he had only seen it once, he very well remembered. From the shadows came forth his servant, a meek-eyed Makalika scoundrel, anxious to see how his baas would take the information that a lady and her “bébé” were in part possession of his waggon.“That’sall right, Bat,” said Bettington trying to keep an inflection of nobility out of his voice. “Camp my things out under that tree over there, and get me a towel. Which way is the river?” (No outspan is ever very far away from a river.)“Just over there, my baas.”“Have my supper ready when I come back. I suppose you got some fresh meat and bread in the town?”“No, my baas,” was the modest reply.“What? The dickens take you—”“I didn’t know when my baas would be back, my baas.”“Oh! Hel—p! Get out some bully beef then, you—you idiot!” Bettington gulped down worse things, wondering gloomily how he was going to suppress the expression of his real opinion of Bat during the rest of the journey, for the boy was a most particular fool and the bane of his life.Moreover, on returning from his dip with the appetite of a wolf gnawing his vitals, he found that though his blankets had been perfunctorily unrolled under the specified tree, of supper there was no sign. His box of provisions had not been got off the waggon, and there was not so much as a tin of bully in sight!“Bat!—you—youbat!” he roared in a terrible voice. But Bat wasnon est. Wise for once, he had melted away into the night.“Of all the miserable!” Bettington was obliged to put his pipe into his mouth and bite on that. Bitterly he thought of that invitation to supper recently refused and by now probably a dead letter.“My Inkosisan wants to speak to the baas,” a voice so gentle and modest that it might have been Bat’s own, spoke at his elbow. It was in fact another of the afflicted Makalika race who stood waving an apologetic hand in the direction of the lady by the waggon. As Bettington moved towards her, she rose from her box and addressed him in a charming but distressed voice.“I can’t tell you how awfully sorry I am, but it appears that I have got your box of provisions.”“Don’t mention it,” said Bettington, mechanically polite.“Mine has evidently been put on to some other waggon by mistake, and I was actually just about to eat your things for my supper.” She motioned to where on another packing-case set out with white enamel plates some slices of bully beef had been arranged with a tomato salad.She looked young and slight in the firelight, and her hair was bronzier than ever. Bettington put on his most velvety manners.“And I hope you still will. I’m delighted that the things have been of any use, though I’m afraid the box contains only the most ordinary kind of junk.”“Not at all—it is full of good things. I had my lunch and breakfast out of it to-day—it never occurred to me for a moment until I heard your boy questioning mine about your box—then I casually glanced at the lid—and to my horror, the name Bettington!”“I am sorry my name should so unpleasantly inspire you,” he deplored.“Oh, of course—I didn’t mean—I—”“The only possible amends I can make is to go at once and look for your box while you finish your supper.”“Oh, but I couldn’t—I am so ashamed. First, it appears, I deprive you of your tent—and now of your food.”“I assure you I have never used the tent in my life. I always prefer to sleep out in the open. As for the food, it makes no odds at all, please believe me.”“But your boy ran away when he could not find your box. You will have no supper!—Youmustshare mine,” she proffered shyly. He gave a surreptitious glance at the wafery slices of beef and tomatoes, then answered with alacrity:“Not at all, not at all. I wasn’t going to have any supper anyway. I’m—I’m not hungry.”He had in fact decided that this was no time to put on exhibition the wolf that raged within him. And his manners being persuasive as well as pretty, he eventually convinced the lady of his sincerity, and she sat down to finish her supper alone while he departed with the air of a man with a mission—which was exactly what he was.Straight as a homing pigeon he headed for the waggon of the wounded warriors. Most of them had already turned in, but the American surgeon, resting near the remains of a good meal, hailed him blithely:“Hullo, Bet!”“For the love of Michael Angelo give me a drink, and a wedge of bread and bully,” said the hapless Bet. “And send your animal of a Makalika to search every waggon until he finds Mrs Stannard’s box of provisions. When found, deliver to me.”Later, his inner man replenished, he returned to McKinnon’s waggon with the air of a conqueror and the recovered box of provisions.“Well! we’ve got it, Mrs Stannard!”She looked up at him with such surprise that he wondered at first whether she had never expected to see it again. Then the truth occurred to him.“I beg your pardon. But I was in Randal and Hallam’s the day you came in to do your shopping. You wouldn’t of course have noticed me,” (the expectant pause he made here was almost imperceptible), “but I was impertinent enough to inquire your name.”“And you recognised me again?”“There are some faces one never forgets,” he said quietly, but effectively. Looking up into his eyes, she saw there something which she had seen in the eyes of men before that night; and which always roused in her a longing to rub their noses in the dust.“Let us hope they are not all crowned with hats,” she said laughingly. “Memory might be over-crowded.”He was delighted with her. To be witty as well as pretty! That made the game worth the heat and toil of the chase! Thus they stood, the rose-lights from the fires about them, the great crushed pearl above them; taking each other’s measure, marking down each other’s weaknesses, and each secretly registering a vow to the other’s undoing. But they parted with the pleasant conventional phrases under which both good and bad intentions are so subtly concealed.She breakfasted within sight the next morning, but he did not go near her, being content after having exchanged a morning greeting, to sit under his tree and reflect upon the ten good days to come. She made a charming picture in her dark short skirt, white blouse, and the rather rakish Panama he remembered so well as a feature of their first encounter in Randal’swinkel. She had brightened up wonderfully since then, he thought. Perhaps the relief of leaving all her domestic troubles behind her had something to do with it, but certainly disillusion had done no harm to her complexion so far, nor worry spoiled the fine line of her cheek and chin. Her looks had an edge to them that appealed to the connoisseur in him. It was not so much that she was pretty, as that she had good lines and that her clear pallor, the tilt of her head, and her dainty walk, carried an air of race and insolence with them; both things that meant something to a man like Bettington who admired the quality of insolence in women almost more than anything—probably because he knew how unworthy he was of anything but their insolent toleration.Before the day’s trek began, there was a lot of gathering up and stowing away of belongings to be done, and it was natural that Bettington being on the spot should help Mrs Stannard.Natural too that he should suggest a tramp ahead as per the example set by numerous other couples, all anxious to avoid the dust and monotony of the trek and get some exercise into the bargain. She tramped a little while with him, and he liked her long swinging walk, and found her mind as buoyant as her feet. When the boy who was perched on the brake of her waggon guarding little Aimée came running to report that the bébé was awake and crying, Bettington could have kicked him with the greatest blessing in the world. Moreover it occurred to him that babies were odious little beasts, and that no nice woman ought to saddle herself with such things.But on later afternoons he blessed the pale and fretful Aimée, for without her as a chaperon he could not have sat hour after hour on the brake of Mrs Stannard’s waggon talking to her on every subject in the world but the one that filled his mind and was to be read plainly in his eyes by anyone who took the trouble to look deep enough.Mrs Stannard was very careful to look neither deep nor long. Bettington came to the conclusion that she was a very clever woman, though he often wondered where she had got her experience. Marriage with Stannard might well have constituted an education, of a kind. But where had she learned that delightful way of assuming all the frank innocence of a young girl?—that lent such piquancy to the fact that she was really a married woman doing a bolt from her duties! And where achieved the subtle art of keeping a man with his toe to the chalk line, without wearing him out or allowing him to show his impatience for the starting bell? Bettington admired her almost to stupefaction for these things. At least it was to stupefaction he assigned the fact that he sometimes found himself sitting and gazing at her until the red crept in a little curly wave from her chin to the bronzy hair. Then indeed it was time to talk about literature, or make himself so useful and amusing to Aimée that Aimée’s mother would not have the heart to drive him away, under the pretext that she had a headache or that Aimée wanted to go to sleep.She had beautiful eyes of an uncommon colour, rather like liquid amber, and as full of dots and dashes as a Marconi message, only far more interesting to read. So thought Bettington at least, and would have liked to spend a great deal of time in sorting out and classifying the natural shades and shadows in them from those brought flickering there by humour or melancholy or any other mood that seized her. When he found out one day by picking up a bracelet which belonged to her that she was called Amber, he rejoiced with his journalistic sense at the singular appropriateness of it, and that night found him lying under the waggon scribbling in his note-book a poem which began:O amber heart, and amber eyes!That the subject of it was sitting not far off in the gloaming shadows, hushing Aimée to sleep and looking rather like a gentle modern Madonna, lent the sting of secret and forbidden pleasure to his occupation. As Wilde says: “The simplest thing is a joy when it is secret!”The one fly in the amber, so to speak, was Aimée. She was always on the spot, and as ubiquitous as only a baby less than a year old can be. True, Mrs Stannard commanded the services of a nurse-boy called September, but the latter was mostly busy with the pots and pans, and Aimée preferred the society of her mother or, failing that, of Bettington. Yes, much to his secret annoyance (and this secret was no joy) the little animal actually liked to sprawl over him, clutching at his moustache and poking her fingers in his ears and up his nose. Sometimes she howled for him to hush her to sleep, and once she refused to take her bottle unless he gave it to her! Another time she spilled her bottle all over his very spick and span breeches and gaiters, and upon that festival he could very willingly have killed and eaten her. Another and horrible occasion when he was lying peacefully on his rug under the waggon, with Amber Eyes sitting sewing on a water barrel near by, the baby crawled over to him, lolled upon him amorously and was sick amongst his hair! Amber released him from its clutches and he escaped to the river, but he hated to look back on that moment—it was not one of those in which he could truthfully claim to have been the master of his fate and the captain of his soul!He never could make out what on earth Mrs Stannard saw in the little monkey to justify the amount of devotion she lavished on it. Many a time and oft, when tohismind a sound spanking would have filled the bill, he was astonished to see with what tenderness and patience Amber Eyes beguiled the peevish elf back to happiness. But, somehow, though it made him impatient he never could help liking her all the better for it. The trouble was that everything she did made him like her the better, but she gave no sign of being similarly affected, and the ten good days were speeding by with never a silver arrow nor a red rose to mark their flight! Five were already gone, and nothing achieved but this one-sided love affair with the abominable Aimée! When he came to think of it, it made him tired. After all, he was a man and a journalist, and something more he hoped to Gad, than food for babes and sucklings! What did Amber Eyes take him for? Having asked himself this question several times, he grew very broody, and wasted a sixth day in sulking.This, he was delighted to note brought her to her bearings, and she began to give him more of her attention. Aimée, whose health was visibly improving from day to day, was handed over more often to the tender care of September, and Mrs Stannard and Bettington resumed their tramps ahead of the waggons, spending long afternoons and evenings in an intimacy that for two people who were nothing to each other would have been almost impossible anywhere else in the world except on the South African veld. None of the other people with the waggons made any comment, most of them being busy grinding little axes of their own, and the rest too full up with the weariness of life to care two bones how that fellow Bettington (who thought such a deuce of a lot of himself!) and Mrs Stannard (whom none of them knew) were occupying their time.So that Bettington had quite a lot ofTime and place and woman altogetherin which to reveal the other side of his soul to Amber Eyes. In fact, he felt that it was up to him to show her the kind of man she had been turning into a nurse-maid and mother’s help; and Bettington in the showing-off attitude was an entrancing spectacle. Fortunately, he sometimes became so interested in the mind of his listener that he forgot to “show off” and then she was really to be felicitated, for Bettington, once you got past a thin outer crust of conceit and arrogance, was an uncommonly clever fellow. In fact, in the matter of his work, he was something of a genius, and when a man has the star of genius glimmering—however faintly—within, a dozen good qualities will be sure to be found, like attendant satellites waiting upon it and throwing it into prominence. Furthermore, he loved his profession with a wholehearted love and knew the practising of it inside out, and up and down the earth, and backwards and forwards upon it, and most things that were to be known about literature past, present, and future. And to his intense satisfaction, Amber Eyes cared also for these things. Her mind had not been spoiled by shallow reading, for she had been educated with great simplicity, and since coming to Rhodesia had lived among men more familiar with sport and outdoor life than with intellectual matters. But she had a natural taste for literature and took to all things pertaining to it as a duck to water. Bettington found her mind not only ready to receive, but to retain what he could feed to it and thereafter to formulate opinions and convictions on what she had heard. He was greatly pleased with her, and as happy as a sparrow on a pump handle, until she went away from him to eat or sleep or mind the baby. Then, he poignantly remembered that it was not thus he had planned to spend the time between Umtali and Beira! What booted it to him to turn a pretty unhappy woman’s eyes inwards to the cultivation of her literary instincts instead of in his own direction? He derided himself for a duffer and was more tormented by the thought of imaginary silver arrows gone astray than was Saint Sebastian by the real steel-tipped article. He dreamed of red roses left ungathered by the roadside, and he wrote another poem.It was at Massi-kessi that she found it lying loose between the leaves of a volume of Henley he had lent her, and she could not but read it for it wore her initials at its head:You came and called me when the world was grey,You whispered of a land of endless May;Of flowers abloom, fair skies, birds always singing:And I, half-listening, lingered on my way.Yes, I half-lingered with a troubled heart,Your dearest sweetness had a touch of smart!Ever at fall of eve I heard the tollingOf Life’s grim curfew bidding us to part.Ah! was it well to take the lonelier way?To thrust with prudent hands the cup away,To leave the harvest of your heart ungarnered,And all the precious treasure of our love to pay?When she had read it, she gave a curious, furious little laugh and said,“What abominable impertinence!”But if Bettington could have seen the colour in her cheeks he would have counted unto himself the first red rose.They left the waggons at Massi-kessi for it was the railway terminus from the coast and they were all to embark next day on the Portuguese train for a journey through Portuguese territory. In the meantime, most of the travellers—for the sake of sleeping in a bed again, and eating a dinner cooked on a stove and served on a table—adjourned to the corrugated-iron hotel which stood bleak and blue in the midst of a waste of sands. Mrs Stannard and her baby were amongst those who went over, and, needless to say, Bettington followed the trail. He spent a good deal of the morning arranging themenufor an exclusive little dinner party composed of himself and Mrs Stannard. It was a charming dinner too and themenua great success, though it embraced nothing more original than a fried sole, lamb cutlets with green vegetables, a sweet omelette, fresh fruit for dessert, and a bottle of wine on ice. This does not sound pretentious, but in the “good old times” in Rhodesia people never saw fresh fruit or fresh fish from one month’s end to another; goat was the only meat ever available and ice a thing remembered only in fevered dreams as a feature of life in some far-away fair land of a long-ago existence. Wherefore Bettington and his guest dinedchezLucullus that evening, and felt very well and happy after it as they sat with a dozen other people on the cool dark stoep, or strolled up and down the one long street of sand. There was a huge mountain of wool-bales lying ready for transportation just beside the hotel, and Amber Eyes, who for some reason was as gay as a canary in a golden cage, had a fancy for climbing this mountain and sitting on its summit, so as to get as near the stars as possible, she said. Their two cigarette tips were the only points of light in the vapoury darkness. She had never smoked a cigarette in her life before, and this fact refreshed the jaded heart of Bettington, accustomed to women who mostly smoked too many. They sat talking there, under the stars and their old friend the crushed pearl who arrived late, until after midnight, and he beguiled her with brilliant tongue and words sweeter than honey in the honeycomb. But her hand was never once within reach of his. Neither did she confide in him that her husband was a brute! Certainly she was an original woman!Since none of the usual confidences were forthcoming from her direction then, Bettington began to unfold (so eloquently that he almost believed it himself) on the poignant loneliness and misery of such a lot in life as his. But his word pictures evoked nothing better from her than silvery giggles, and after she had had enough, she took a firm hand on the reins once more, and turned his nose into the safe fields of literature and adventure. He had tired of these subjects and was a little inclined to fall into gloom when she would not listen to the tales of his woes, but she was so gay and sparkly it seemed a pity to dim her pleasure, and churlish not to sparkle and be gay with her. So he bottled up his emotions for the time being, though he did not omit to put as much of them as he dared into his good-night handshake. He possessed very firm magnetic hands and had rather specialised in the use of them in cases where speech was not permitted.He slept badly that night. It seemed to him that, in spite of all the good fun he got out of his success as a soldier of fortune and journalist, he was missing some vital thing in life and he could not bear it. He hated missing things. It made him feel like the “weariest river” making a bee-line for the nearest sea.In the tender sunshine of early morning, they took train for the coast. The carriages were two long narrow affairs on a two-foot gauge, built like tram-cars, with seats running down the sides and the passengers sitting in two lines facing each other. Amber Eyes and her baby had a seat in a corner of the men’s compartment because for one reason, Aimée could not bear to be separated from her unwilling love, Bettington, and for another because in the other compartment a woman was too critically ill to be able to bear the noise of a little child.Hour by hour, the tender sunshine of dawn developed into smiting, biting heat that blistered the paint on the roof above their heads. Some of the men slept uneasily and some sat wrapt in reflection. Bettington could have done with an idle hour himself, but Aimée kept him busy. She sprawled and clambered on him, and banged his watch against his nose. He would have liked to banghernose on the floor, but the fact that Amber Eyes in her corner grew paler and paler every moment, drooping like a flower in the heat, kept a galvanised smile on his face. If he did not look after Aimée she would torment her mother, and that contingency was not to be thought of. But oh! how he would have enjoyed pushing the little worm out of the window,—and probably would have done it if it could have been engineered without suspicion attaching to himself. He saw some of the wounded warriors exchanging facetious smiles as Aimée tore his hair, whooping like a Comanchee on the war-path, and could only glare at them and curse inwardly, meditating on the revenge he would take out of their pockets on the voyage down coast.“I’ll rook them of every red cent at poker,” he promised savagely. “I’ll make them cough up their last bone!”Towards afternoon Aimée felt seedy, and despite all his efforts to keep her, climbed over to Amber Eyes and lay lamenting in her arms. Then did Bettington sitting forward, contort his face and do strange tricks with his fingers, and almost burst himself in the effort to amuse her. But nothing was any good. She would stare for a moment with her large slate-coloured eyes, then they would fill up and brim over with tears, even while they remained wide open and observant, and she lamented like a banshee. Sometimes she screwed herself into a ball and ejected sharp barking sounds, and sometimes she lengthened herself into a plank that would not be bent up again; but always at spasmodic intervals she howled. The heat beat down through the carriage roof on to the cooped-up travellers and came in sweltering waves through the open windows. Mrs Stannard grew paler than ever and great purple shadows lay like pansies under the amber eyes. Suddenly her hold on the baby relaxed and the latter rolled on to the floor. Some other man picked her up and comforted her as best he might while Bettington made play with the water bottle and brandy flask. After a little while, Mrs Stannard recovered and rewarded him with a pale smile and stammering apology.“I am ashamed. It is too bad of us—first Aimée and now me. How you must hate us!”It was at about that time that Bettington began to realise that he loved her. The real thing had got hold of him at last. He wished he could take her in his arms and kiss away her troubles and her tears forever. He would have given his skin to sole her shoes with. He wished he could die for her. But he only turned very pale himself, and set his arrogant jaw, and took Aimée on his knees and hushed her, and didn’t give a damn any more what the other men thought, and prayed for the end of that infernal journey as he had never prayed for anything in his life.At length, the weary day drew to a close, and in the hot darkness the train pulled up at Fontes-Villa, which is—or was in those days—a unique little corrugated-iron Hades situated on one of the best malarial and mosquito sites in the world. The swamp on which it stood sizzling resembled a large stage carpet made of coarse artificial grass and rushes dyed a bright green by the arsenate-of-copper process. Sliding past in stealthy grim silence, full of crocodiles, and germs, and green slime, was the Pungwe River.Here the train stood brooding for some hours as if considering the advisability of a midnight plunge. No one seemed to know what was going to happen next, and no one cared much. Enough that after the waggling, jerking, switch-back movements that had prevailed all day there was quiescence. A turgid, heavily-smelling breeze of sorts that meandered unwillingly through the long compartment seemed a heaven-sent zephyr, and everything would have been beautiful if only Aimée had not been vile. She continued her clamourings with renewed energy, and Amber Eyes said that she needed a bottle and that if Bettington would hold the poor little thing she would go and find September and send him up to the hotel (if there was one) to get warm water and mix a bottle of condensed milk. Naturally Bettington volunteered to go and lug out September himself from the truck in which the native boys were sleeping. After an interval then, September arrived with the mixed bottle and Aimée got her supper. But before she was half through it, Amber Eyes discovered that the water was stone cold and would probably be the cause of cramps in Aimée’s anatomy for the rest of the voyage. Again the luckless Bettington went a-hunting for September, but this time the quest was unsuccessful of any result except the news that both September and his own boy Bat had made up their mysterious and labyrinthian minds that they did not care to proceed further on the journey, therefore had taken their blankets and headed back for Umtali. Another thing that Bettington learned was that September had not gone to the hotel at all for water for the baby’s bottle, nor even looked for an hotel, but had simply slunk down to the river’s edge, shipped a bottle of the grey-green slime and mixed itau naturelwith the condensed milk. This information the journalist kept to himself. He did not think it would be of the slightest use to Mrs Stannard, and if Aimée were poisoned—tant pisfor Aimée! But he doubted there being any such luck. Aimée, he felt convinced, was destined to live to be the scourge of other fine men.His next job was to go up to the hotel himself and get hot water to make the bottle. Even that was better than sitting still in the little devildom Aimée was creating in the compartment since she found herself robbed of the solacing bottle. Besides Bettington was getting used to his job, even as eels get used to skinning.One thing to the good was that when hediddiscover the hotel and rouse the inmates he was able to achieve a whiskey and soda, and sandwich for himself, and bear back similar trophies to the fainting and haggard Amber Eyes. As for Aimée, she had her bottle at last, and Bettington felt that the whole noble army of martyrs were not in the running with him. “And after all these vices there was peace!”Just as silence and slumber were spreading their wings over the weary caravan, the railway officials appeared from nowhere and briskly routed the passengers out in a great hurry to cross the river on a pont and embark on another train waiting on the further side. Ensued a great struggle and scramble after baggage. Eventually the change was accomplished and the journey continued until arrival at the Beira station.It was for the passengers to find out for themselves that the station was about two miles away from the only possible hotel, and the country between of the roughest kind of veld—all scrub, hillocks, bush, and ant-holes; that there were no conveyances or porters; and that it was up to every man to shoulder his own pack and foot it for home. And it was for Bettington, the brilliant journalist, fascinating man of the world, and gifted poet, to take up the White Man’s Burden once more. With Aimée in his arms, a basket containing Aimée’s impedimenta on his back, his own knapsack slung about his waist, and Amber Eyes laden with smaller articles bringing up the rear, he felt like a prehistoric man on a forced march for fair pastures and better hunting. And in his heart he was saying:“I may as well take on the job for good! I’ve become a family man. I’ve got used to fixing baby’s bottle now and lugging her around. Oh, pot!”All round them, struggling in the dimness over ant-hill and ant-bear hole, were other baggage-laden forms, faithfully padding the hoof. The “wounded bunch,” as became warriors were making light of their woes. From their ranks came an occasional laugh and snatches of a ribald song set to the opening bars of the “Soldier’s March” inFaust, accompanied by bang and boom of a tin pannikin and some hollow article (perhaps a bread box?)Drunk (bang!) last night,Drunk the night before (boom!)Drunk (bang!) last night,Never get drunk any more! (Boom!)Bettington felt that he was different to these men. Nobler in some sort. Between them and him lay a great gulf fixed. He had deeper depths and could rise to higher heights. Thank God he was not as these!Eventually they reached the hotel and Amber Eyes having engaged a room disappeared with the baby and Bettington was his own man once more. He in turn engaged himself a room, and went to bed, to dream that he had a baby of his own and was going to take in washing to earn his living.As no steamer awaited them at Beira, the passengers from Rhodesia had to amuse themselves as best they might until a steamer turned up. No difficult feat this. Beira also was a corrugated-iron Hades, but at least the verandah of the Royal Hotel was deep and cool and palm-shaded; and there were supplies of fresh fish and fruit; and ice to clink in the glass; and though the sea was chocolate-coloured and “jiggers” hid in the sands, itwasthe sea, and it smelled of home, and brought memories of far-away joys that were getting nearer! Anyway, it was good to be leaving Rhodesia and trouble behind, with faces set to a new horizon where trouble had not yet materialised! So thought most of the travellers. And perhaps it was the philosophy of Amber Eyes too, and perhaps that was why she so visibly brightened and bloomed. All was well with Aimée as Bettington had opined, in spite of Pungwe River germs, and all was well with the world.Only Bettington was troubled in his mind. He too had a philosophy that, so far, had helped him to waggle his way pretty well through a weary world, but for the moment it seemed to be suffering from a weak spine. His philosophy had always been to desire things and he would get them, especially if he gave Fate a leg up every now and again, and reached out far enough. True the leg up sometimes hit him a clout in the eye, and the reached-out hand sometimes got its fingers burned; but that was all in the day’s shooting and part of the game. The main point was that always in the long run he had got what he greatly desired.And now it did not look as if things were going to work out that way! He found himself desiring something that was already in the possession of someone else—for “better or worse, for richer or poorer!” He who had made up his mind never to have a wife and baby of his own, was now hankering to take possession of the wife and baby of someone else! The thing was ridiculous of course. It was so silly that he could even laugh at it himself.“What a fool I should look carting Stannard’s baby round the world. Blow that Aimée! After all, if I’m going to be a nurse-maid, surely I can get a baby of my own to mind!”Yes, he could laugh and gibe at it himself, but even in the act of doing so something gripped him round the heart and made him feel physically sick. It was the thought of the day when he would see the Amber Eyes no more! Wherefore he gazed into them all that day as much as decency permitted, and a trifle over. He was overjoyed to see that she could no longer return his gaze with her frank, disarming glance of girlish innocence. A bird sang in his breast every time the colour sprang into her cheek under his hardy eye.She had got another nurse-boy for the baby and so had a little liberty in which to roam about Beira, looking at the coolie curio-shops, and riding on the trollies that ran up and down the town. She bought herself an Indian silk shirt of delicate rainbow tints softly blending into one another, and he acquired a set of six twisted gold bangles for an imaginary sister, and a little one for Aimée. Then he wanted to give Amber Eyes a little black ebony walking-stick knobbed and tipped with ivory. But she would not have it.“Not even a little remembrance of our journey down?” he pleaded.“It looks like amemento mori,” she protested.“It will be one if you use it to walk away from me.”“I am able to do that without the use of a crutch,” she laughed.“I daresay. What you arenotable to do is to prevent me from following, even if I have to come on crutches.”“Surely you are too clever a man to waste your time?”She turned away from him with a bright cheek, leaving no time for a response. Not that he had a response ready. He was not quite sure whether hewasa clever man or not, nor whether he stood on his head or his heels. But he meant to keep his balance. And he did—right up to nine o’clock that night.At that time he was seated beside her in a trolley car which also contained half a dozen other people bent on a moonlight drive. The little bag she carried slipped to the floor and in stooping to recover it for her in the contracted space his face touched her knee whereon lay her hand. Under an uncontrollable impulse he pressed his lips to it. She instantly drew it away, and they sat in silence for a moment. Then, below the noise of the trolley wheels she heard his voice very low and vibrating:“Amber, I love you!”She stared straight ahead, making no kind of response. He was left to wonder whether or not she had heard, and obliged to assume an air of calm he did not feel. A little of the red had slipped out of his complexion before they reached the end of the drive, but also his jaw had taken on its most dogged look, and as they all dismounted and began to stroll towards the hotel he said with the quiet deliberation of the man who means to have his way:“Walk down to the little bridge with me, please. I must speak to you.”“It is getting late,” she demurred.“I shall not keep you long.”They walked in silence, their feet slipping and slithering in the loose sand, until they reached the bridge; then stopped to lean on the low parapet and stare down at the water just below.“You heard what I said in the car?” he asked.Perhaps she thought he was addressing the fishes for she made no answer. Then very quietly he said again:“I love you, Amber!”There was a great stillness between them. Truly as the wise people of old held, to give a man the use of your name is to give him power over you! He felt that he had power over her and perhaps that was why her hand lying on the bridge rail trembled, though her voice was quite level.“Why do you call me by that name, Mr Bettington?”“Because I love you, woman with the amber eyes, and the amber hair, and the clear amber heart,” he said gently and strongly, and took her hands in his. “And I think that you love me.”“You are mistaken,” she said coldly, drawing away her hands.The light went out of his face like a quenched flame. He turned away and leaned heavily on the bridge. She continued calmly:“You merely have for me the terrible charm that a bad man has for a woman when he is the first bad man she has ever known.”“Me?” cried Bettington, forgetting dignity and grammar and everything else in genuine astonishment. “I’m not bad! I like that! What about Stannard?”She seemed flabbergasted for a moment, then:“How generous you are!” she said scornfully. “Besides he is not really a bad man, only a weak one.”“One bad man is worth forty weak ones,” averred Bettington bitterly. He was astonished and indignant at the line the conversation had taken.“I do not deny that there is much good in you,” she said more kindly. “I can never forget how kind you have been on the journey down. When I think of all the things you did for me and Aimée I hardly know how to thank you.”“Don’t try,” he interrupted. “I did nothing any man wouldn’t have done for you.”He had to gulp all the same, thinking of Aimée and her bottles and her bag of impedimenta.“And now you spoil it all,” she said sorrowfully. “By taking me for one of those hateful, disloyal women to whom any man may make love the moment she is out of her husband’s sight!”“In all humility I beg you to forgive me,” said Bettington.There was no doubt about it that for once in his life he was getting the worst of it, but somehow he minded that fact less than he minded the tightening grip round his heart. In grim earnest, now, he heard “the tolling of Life’s curfew” bidding them to part, and he wondered what he should do with the rest of his life. She had not quite finished rubbing his nose in the dust.“How can I forgive you? I should not consider myself worthy of the worst or weakest man in the world if I were such a woman as you thought.”But Bettington’s nose was too sore for any further ill-treatment. His natural combativeness began to reassert itself.“I didn’t think anything,” he said moodily. “I just couldn’t help loving you, that’s all. If you want me to abase myself any more, Amber, say so, and I’ll do it. But that won’t prevent me from going on loving you.”She intimated with great dignity that she wished nothing further of him but the courtesy of his escort back to the hotel. They returned in silence, but at the door of the stoep, just as she was on the point of going in, she said quietly:“I may as well tell you that my name is Juliet. Amber is my sister’s name.”That was the last straw! He went away raging. How could he have wasted the golden treasure of his heart on her? She was one of those coldblooded brutes of women who think they can do anything they like with men—(instead of letting men do anything they like with them!) He thought he should never feel better again, except after a bottle of Guinness’s mixed with a pint of champagne. But even that had a less satisfactory effect than usual.No sign of her for the greater part of next day, and discreet inquiry of Rupee, the new nurse-boy, elicited the fact that she was resting with a bad headache. For some occult reason the information cheered Bettington wonderfully. The steamer that was to take them all down to Durban arrived, and he and some of the warrior men went down to choose their cabins for the next day’s departure. Bettington knew the Captain well, and accepted an invitation to lunch. He had a sort of feeling that by so doing he was scoring off the falsely-called Amber. She should see that though she didn’t want him somebody else did,—if it was only the Captain of a Union-Castle liner. He knew the feeling was childish, but he had it all the same.When he got back to the hotel, there she was sitting in the verandah. She went on writing her letters and pretended not to see him, so he got a newspaper and pretended to read it. This state of affairs continued for a long time, until an interruption came in the shape of a Cape cart with four spanking mules which pulled up before the hotel. A little hardy blue-eyed woman descended, and Bettington immediately recognised in her a lady whom he knew very well. She was the wife of a South African railway contractor, and the Madame Sans Gêne of Salisbury, from whence she and her husband had evidently just driven in their own conveyance. She did not see Bettington at once, but pounced on Amber Eyes and shook her hand vigorously.“How do, Miss van Rimmel? We came through Umtali and I saw your sister, Mrs Stannard. She loaded me with loving messages for you. I also have a parcel for the baby. Hope she’s fit?”“Ah! Thank you,” cried Amber Eyes, and looked over the other woman’s shoulder to where Bettington stood with mouth open and eyes starting in his head. “My sister’s baby is very well. I had such excellent help with her on the way down.”“Good! Mrs Stannard was rather anxious as to how you would manage. Stan is getting along fine, and they hope to join you and Aimée in Durban much sooner than they expected. Hullo, Bet! Whatyoudoing here?”Bettington came forward and made such genuflections as were expected of him. His eyes had resumed their normal position, and his mouth was now trimmed with a sarcastic smile. But it is fair to say that the sarcasm was at his own expense. When Mrs Paulton had gone in and left them alone, he said gravely:“I hope it gave you great pleasure to make a fool of me?”“To do one’s duty should always be pleasant,” she responded with a ghost of a smile in her eye.“Do you think you played quite fair?”“Do you thinkyoudid? Because I look like my sister, and borrow her Panama, and wear her bangle, are those any reasons why you should take me for a married woman—and a disloyal one at that?”Bettington had to take his medicine like a man. The best he could do was to mutter with a pious eye that he “thanked God she was not.”“I thank God too,” she said inflexibly. But a little later she added more kindly:“Perhaps we both rather meanly took advantage of private information.”“I don’t know what inexpiable things you could have heard about me?” he asked reproachfully, secure in a sense of self-righteousness.“When I persuaded my sister to let me go at the last moment instead of herself, Mr Randal gave me a brief résumé of your character and career. No doubt he thought it might interest me to know something of the man whose waggon I was to share.”Ah! He almost wished he had time to go back to Umtali for a few days. Yet he really could not feel very mad with Randal or anyone else. Life looked so beguilingly fair all at once. His heart was light as a cork, but he pitched his voice to a becomingly humble key.“Don’t you think we might begin again from quite a new basis?” he asked, looking at her with all the arrogance gone out of his eyes. “Without remembering any secret information or old scores?”She considered a little while with downcast eyes, and a faint flush in her cheek. At last: “All right,” she said softly. Then added reflectively: “Aimée will want a lot of looking after on the voyage.”But Bettington’s spirit was not quite broken.“No!” he said clearly and firmly, “I bar Aimée.”“Sheisrather a little reptile,” said Aimée’s aunt.

Dettington lounged moodily against the counter of Randal and Hallam’swinkel, his eyes sardonic, his mouth decorated with discontent. He was bored to the verge of suicide. Two whole days had been wasted in Umtali waiting for the convoy of waggons with all his kit on board, to arrive from Salisbury. Thirty miles off he had taken advantage of a lift offered him by a man in a trap and come on ahead. Now he was wishing himself back at the waggons instead of stuck in this place where everyone appeared to have been dead and buried for the last five years, in spite of the recent native rebellion when they had all had to leave their homes and come into laager with not enough food and ammunition to go round. Since then the Imperial troops had passed through, bent on punitive measures, and people had gone back to their homes and were dully occupied in nursing and feeding themselves into good health again.

The burden of Bettington’s song of dolour was that there was no one to talk to, nothing to drink but bad whiskey at a pound a bottle, not a man who could play poker worth a tin tack, no one keen on a shoot, and not a pretty woman in sight! Driven to sitting among the piles of coloured blankets, and bags of meal, and Kaffir corn, that composed the stock-in-grade of Randal and Hallam, he grew madder and madder every minute. Not so was he accustomed to waste his good time and rare gifts.

The shop was a large galvanised iron shed, lined with shelves and a counter, and stuffed with every imaginable thing on earth that had a strong smell attached to it—leather, limbo, toilet soap, paraffin, cheese, tarred rope, shoddy blankets, and tinned foods sweltering in their tins. Hallam who had been a medical student at Columbia until the examiners turned him down, was casting up the firm’s books, perched on a packing-case at the far end of the shop. Randal flannel-shirted, pipe in mouth, coatless, tieless, his fair hair in damp streaks on his forehead, sat opposite Bettington, his elbows folded on the counter before him. No one would have guessed him an old Harrovian (except Bettington who was one himself), and one who in his year had stroked for Leander, but he was at peace with all the world, in spite of a poisoned foot that kept him from leaving the premises. Nothing about him of the restless energy which characterised the blonde man burnt a bright red who sat on the other side of the counter.

Vigour and vitality was in Bettington’s every line. He wore his hat slouched low, but beneath it could be discerned a shrewd grey-green eye, a nose jutting out like an insolent rock, a mouth with more than a hint of coarseness but none of weakness about it.

With the crop in his hand, he smote indiscriminately at his gaitered legs or the bags of mealies and other merchandise surrounding him.

“Nice country!” he muttered, giving so vicious a cut at a pile of shoddy Kaffir blankets, striped with gaudy red and yellow, that a cloud of dust ascended from it and joined all the other little cloudlets whirling and whisking through the open door from the hot and dusty street.

“Youneedn’t kick—you’re leaving it,” said Randal, sucking peacefully at his pipe. “Stop beating the colour out of my blankets. I got to make my living selling them forportièresand table covers.”

“No one in this hole with the spunk to get up a shoot, and half a dozen lions roaring their heads off out at Penhalonga! Oh, pot!”

“Yes, it’s sad,” agreed Randal. “But the fellows round here are like Oom Paul, they haven’t lost any lions. Besides, this is the first I’ve heard of half a dozen. The nigger only reported one, and I daresay he saw that in his dreams.”

Bettington became inconsequently derisive.

“This would be a fine place to raise a team for the Olympian Games, I should think—or send out an expedition against the Mad Mullah—any great adventure might have birth here!”

“What a fellow you are, Bettington! Haven’t you had enough excitement round Salisbury during this unholy rebellion? One would think you’d be glad of a rest!”

“Rest—nothing,” said the other savagely. “Time enough to rest when I’m dead.”

“You soon will be, all right,” prophesied Randal cheerfully. “You worry too much behind your face.”

No similar accusation could be levelled at Eustace, commonly known as Useless Randal, and Bettington was about to intimate as much when something caused him to sit to attention. A woman had quietly entered the shop, and from a sheet of paper in her hand began to read out a list of her requirements to Hallam. It transpired that she stood in need of a tin kettle, a water bag, six tins of bully beef, six ditto of sardines, a box of biscuits, matches, sugar, tea, coffee, and plenty of condensed milk. All were to be packed in an open packing-case ready for use on a journey. Bettington listened to these instructions because he liked the sound of her voice, but he considered it out of place in Randal to sit with mouth open and ears cocked like a terrier at point.

She had pretty dark bronzy hair pushed up under a sunburnt Panama; worn but well-shaped brown leather shoes; ditto gloves; and a good line to her grey linen coat. When she turned away from Hallam to look speculatively at the provisions on the shelves, Bettington caught sight of a pale haughty little profile, a small ear, and a curving cheek. It was a long while indeed since a profile had impressed him so agreeably. A slight sound, made no doubt inadvertently, with his crop, caused her to turn her head quickly in the direction of the two men, revealing for a moment a face that would more than have fulfilled the promise of its outline but for the look of weariness and disdain stamped upon it. At her glance, Randal rose upon his poisoned foot, clutched the buttonless shirt across his bosom, and bowed with grace. Bettington, whose hat had been jammed on his forehead concealing all but one arrogant eye, removed it abruptly and placed it on the counter, thus affording to anyone sufficiently interested an uninterrupted view of the sanguine complexion and well-shaped head of Africa’s most brilliant journalist.

It was not quite apparent whether or not the lady availed herself of this priceless opportunity—while nodding recognition to Randal, but a faint colour showed in her cheek as she turned back to Hallam.

“Please don’t forget the condensed milk,” she murmured. “And would you try and pick out the freshest looking tins, Mr Hallam? My little child lives on it, and it is very important to have it good. You know the last you had was dreadfully yellow and old.”

“Yes, it was a bad lot, Mrs Stannard. I am awfully sorry, but, as you know, we couldn’t help it. We never meant to sell that consignment when we found it was bad. But Colonel Monk commandeered it for the children’s use as there was nothing better in the town.”

“I know. I’m not complaining,” she said gently. “The children would have starved without it. Only I do hope you’ve got some fresher tins in now?”

“Why, certainly,” Hallam waved his hand at the well-filled shelves behind him. “We’ve got plenty of everything since the troops came up. And I can vouch for the milk—it’s a first-class brand, and fresh as paint. Where are these things to be sent, Mrs Stannard? Out to your camp?”

“No,” she said in a low voice; “keep them here until that convoy of waggons arrives from Salisbury—they are expected to-night, I believe—then send the box out to be put on the waggon in which I have engaged accommodation for myself and child.” Hallam looked up as if something had hit him, but she stared at him so haughtily that he dropped his eyes and applied himself to the business of adding up the bill. She paid, and with a cold nod and no further glance at the other men left the shop. Bettington, having occasion to go to the door to examine some whip thongs that hung in a bunch before the entry, saw her walking in light fleet fashion towards the Police Camp.

“Shewon’t hurt the daisies,” he murmured pleasantly to himself, as he sauntered back into the shop where the two other men were neck deep in what sounded perilously like village scandal.

“What do you think of that?” Hallam was inquiring with a stunned air. He had come over to Randal’s side of the shop. “She’s had enough! Going to take the baby and scoot!”

“And I don’t blame her a brass button. The only wonder is she didn’t do it long ago!” Randal wore a judicial manner.

“Her sister kept her from it, I guess, and lack of funds. Stannard is tight with the sinews of war. Needs them all to square his whiskey bills.”

Bettington made no attempt to take part in this interesting dialogue, but listened to it very carefully and pensively.

“What will Miss van Rimmel do?” Randal wondered. “Go with her?”

“Not she. She’s always been dead against her sister leaving Stannard. Thinks that while there’s life there’s hope of reformation, even in such a double-dyed sheep as he is. I bet if Mrs Stannard does go,she’llstay behind and nurse Stan through—and the Doc says he’s got ’em bad this time—rats and cats and purple elephants.”

“I don’t care what colour the menagerie is as long as it keeps Miss van Rimmel here.”

“Me neither,” averred Hallam elegantly.

They became aware of Bettington’s sardonic presence, and dropped the subject as if it burnt.

“As I was saying,” remarked Randal briskly, “we had better take fifty pounds of that dried buck off that Boer. It’s the best biltong I’ve struck since I dunno when.”

“Right you are!” Hallam began to write in his note book. Randal turned his attention to the thoughtful journalist.

“What about your lions, Bet? Still think of going out to look for them?”

Bet regarded him pensively.

“So I am to have the society of a pretty lady between here and Beira?” he remarked.

“You? Who said so?” Randal’s voice sounded slightly aggressive. “I suppose there are other people besides you on those waggons, Bettington?”

“Yes, but no one so good-looking,” said Bettington, wrinkling his rocky nose and gazing at them with bland eyes. “Besides the only empty tent is the one on the waggon where my kit is.”

The other two studied his red complexion discontentedly.

“Well, you ought to be very nice to that lady,” quoth Hallam at last.

“I’ll try to be,” promised Bettington earnestly. The American may or may not have been reassured, but Randal stirred uneasily.

“She drew a blank in the marriage lottery, all right,” continued Hallam. “But she has a nice little kid, and a sister that could take any man in this country in tow if she cared to, but she don’t.”

“Wise sister!” thought Bettington, “but I’m glad it’s notshewho’s going to Beira.” What he said was:

“I should regard Stannard as more in the nature of a surprise packet with a live bomb inside it than a blank. I used to know him years ago, before drink and gambling debts drove him out of the army. How came a pretty woman like that to tie up with him?”

“You can search me. I guess she hadn’t seen many other fellows.”

“That was just it,” proffered Randal. “They belong to an old Huguenot family, and these girls were brought up as innocent as lambs on a farm near Worcester, and I suppose thought everything that had worn a British uniform was an angel, and every man that came from England a gentleman.”

“Well, they know better now, no doubt,” remarked Bettington pleasantly, and looked at his watch. “I think I’ll go round to the Bank and see if I can decoy Johnson out to Penhalonga to-night. Sure you won’t come, Hallam?”

“Can’t! Randal’s poisoned foot has me tied up here.”

After the journalist had gone, Randal spoke to his partner gloomily. “Damn bad luck his going on the same trek with Mrs Stannard. She’s just rottenly unhappy enough not to care what she does, and he’s just the fellow women throw their bonnets over the mill for.”

“Why, he is as ugly as Halifax!” exclaimed Hallam.

“That makes nix. He’s got brains behind that lovely complexion, and women like brains.”

“More likely that insolent, don’t-care-a-tinker’s-curse air of his that gets ’em,” mused the American.

“He doesn’t care a tinker’s curse either. He’d walk over anybody to get his own way. He threw down the editorship of the biggest paper at the Cape because he wouldn’t take orders from the owners, and the same thing up at Salisbury. He hadn’t run theJournala month before he bust up with Max the proprietor. Refused to air Max’s politics because they weren’t his own, and went off and fought the niggers instead. Now he’s got another big job in Johannesburg. Everybody wants him till they get him. There’s no doubt he can put it all over every other journalist in South Africa.”

Later, the subject of this monograph returned to the shop with a demand for .303 cartridges, and the announcement that he had got Johnson, a horse, and some boys. Remained only to get the lion, and he seemed cocksure of that.

His parting injunction to Randal was to have his box of provisions put on McKinnon’s waggon if the convoy passed through before he got back, and to send out a messenger to let him know where the waggons were so that he could go straight after them without returning to Umtali.

As it happened, he did not get back, and the waggons passed through that night whilst he and Johnson were lying behind a roughly constructed scherm between the Penhalonga hills. Smokeless, drinkless, oppressed by a deep and nameless silence, ears straining and guns at the cock, they were in a state of discomfort only to be suffered in the quest for glory. But the lion came at the pitch-black hour of two, and his doom was dight.

They breakfasted in the grey dawn, and while the boys skinned the trophy, Johnson, who besides being a bank manager, was a gossip and something of a wit, regaled the journalist with amusing biographies of the Umtali residents. Incidentally the Stannards came before the board, and Bettington learned, among other things, that the ex-army man had been running a farm out beyond the Police Camp, that the farm was a failure, and all his wife’s money had gone in it, likewise the money of his sister-in-law; that the latter was very pretty, and Randal and Hallam only two of a dozen men who were in love with her; but that she would have none of them, preferring to devote all her time to the business of minding the Stannard baby and keeping the peace in the Stannard household. In fact, there was very little about this unpropitious ménage that Bettington did not learn, and the more he heard the more he felicitated himself upon the fact that with the oxen and veld in the state they were it would take ten good days to reach Beira. Those ten days looked good to him. Next to shooting, and fighting, and writing, he held that life had nothing more piquant to offer than the society of a pretty, disillusioned married woman. It was not so much because he was a scoundrel that he preferred them married, as because he knew himself fonder of adventure and travel and a careless life than he could ever be of a wife. Wherefore he had long ago decided that marriage was not for him. It did not follow, according tohiscode, that flirtation was not for him; only that he must eschew the society of pretty girls and devote himself to the pretty women who were safely tied up. Certainly, even in this there was a risk of finding himself laid by the heels for life; but it was less of a risk than flirtation with girls entailed.

For the rest, he held with Gordon that—

No game was ever yet worth a rap.For a rational man to play;Into which no accident or mishapCould possibly find a way.

No game was ever yet worth a rap.For a rational man to play;Into which no accident or mishapCould possibly find a way.

It was on the evening of the following day that he came upon the convoy of waggons outspanned a few miles beyond Christmas Pass—a romantic spot with a backing of velvet mountains, a foreground of rolling plain, and a three-quarter moon like a crushed pearl hanging over all. Evening fires were alight, there was clank of pan and pannikin, and pleasant savoury odours pervaded the air. Little groups of men lay upon the ground—many of them had tramped all day and were weary. Women were unpacking provision baskets and children pranced happily about the fires.

In all, about forty people were travelling together down to the coast with the idea of getting away for a time from a country which during the last year had suffered the double mischance of war and cattle pest. Some of the travellers were ruined farmers, others were miners whose machinery and property had been destroyed by the natives. There were men too, who, having been wounded in the fighting, were going down to Durban or the Cape to recruit. Several families were leaving the country altogether, disheartened by the disasters they had suffered. The war was over, but on account of the existing danger of small parties being attacked by still revengeful natives, the Government had placed this convoy of waggons, with drivers and boys at the disposal of such people as were anxious to get away. The regular mail service not yet having been resumed, Bettington, in a great hurry to reach Johannesburg, had been thankful, like many another, to avail himself of this opportunity to get down-country.

He picked his way through the camp, stopping only to inquire as to the whereabouts of his boy and McKinnon’s waggon; greeting an acquaintance or two; and refusing a pressing invitation to sup at the waggon of the “wounded bunch,” one of whom, an American surgeon on crutches with a bullet lodged in his hip bone, was a very good friend of his.

Bettington had not joined any mess coming down from Salisbury, for he was a fellow of moods and tenses, and constant companionship bored him. Times were when he liked his society high, and times were when he preferred it low, but always he chose to seek and cull it for himself, and for that which was thrust upon him he had no use. He rather estranged people by giving the impression that he believed the world made for the special benefit of Bettington, and nothing in it quite too good for Bettington; but this arrogance of character was more assumed than real; for he had discovered that it rid him of society he did not need, and insured him against intrusion when he wanted to work, or in those dark hours which came to him as to the most self-satisfied of us when he was face to face with the fact that Bettington was no very great chalks after all, and not within a thousand miles of the fine fellow he set out to be originally.

It cannot be pretended, however, that he was suffering from any such mood at this time. Quite the reverse. A man who has potted his lion overnight owns a little secret fountain of vainglory to drink at that will keep him from being thirsty for some time.

He was hungry, however, and hot, and slightly footsore, for he had handed over his borrowed horse to Randal’s messenger and thereafter tramped some miles of bad road with the thermometer at something over a hundred and ten.

As he approached his waggon, he became aware of a woman’s slight graceful figure sitting on a box not far off, with a little child playing at her knees. Her profile etched against the firelight, was one which, though he had only seen it once, he very well remembered. From the shadows came forth his servant, a meek-eyed Makalika scoundrel, anxious to see how his baas would take the information that a lady and her “bébé” were in part possession of his waggon.

“That’sall right, Bat,” said Bettington trying to keep an inflection of nobility out of his voice. “Camp my things out under that tree over there, and get me a towel. Which way is the river?” (No outspan is ever very far away from a river.)

“Just over there, my baas.”

“Have my supper ready when I come back. I suppose you got some fresh meat and bread in the town?”

“No, my baas,” was the modest reply.

“What? The dickens take you—”

“I didn’t know when my baas would be back, my baas.”

“Oh! Hel—p! Get out some bully beef then, you—you idiot!” Bettington gulped down worse things, wondering gloomily how he was going to suppress the expression of his real opinion of Bat during the rest of the journey, for the boy was a most particular fool and the bane of his life.

Moreover, on returning from his dip with the appetite of a wolf gnawing his vitals, he found that though his blankets had been perfunctorily unrolled under the specified tree, of supper there was no sign. His box of provisions had not been got off the waggon, and there was not so much as a tin of bully in sight!

“Bat!—you—youbat!” he roared in a terrible voice. But Bat wasnon est. Wise for once, he had melted away into the night.

“Of all the miserable!” Bettington was obliged to put his pipe into his mouth and bite on that. Bitterly he thought of that invitation to supper recently refused and by now probably a dead letter.

“My Inkosisan wants to speak to the baas,” a voice so gentle and modest that it might have been Bat’s own, spoke at his elbow. It was in fact another of the afflicted Makalika race who stood waving an apologetic hand in the direction of the lady by the waggon. As Bettington moved towards her, she rose from her box and addressed him in a charming but distressed voice.

“I can’t tell you how awfully sorry I am, but it appears that I have got your box of provisions.”

“Don’t mention it,” said Bettington, mechanically polite.

“Mine has evidently been put on to some other waggon by mistake, and I was actually just about to eat your things for my supper.” She motioned to where on another packing-case set out with white enamel plates some slices of bully beef had been arranged with a tomato salad.

She looked young and slight in the firelight, and her hair was bronzier than ever. Bettington put on his most velvety manners.

“And I hope you still will. I’m delighted that the things have been of any use, though I’m afraid the box contains only the most ordinary kind of junk.”

“Not at all—it is full of good things. I had my lunch and breakfast out of it to-day—it never occurred to me for a moment until I heard your boy questioning mine about your box—then I casually glanced at the lid—and to my horror, the name Bettington!”

“I am sorry my name should so unpleasantly inspire you,” he deplored.

“Oh, of course—I didn’t mean—I—”

“The only possible amends I can make is to go at once and look for your box while you finish your supper.”

“Oh, but I couldn’t—I am so ashamed. First, it appears, I deprive you of your tent—and now of your food.”

“I assure you I have never used the tent in my life. I always prefer to sleep out in the open. As for the food, it makes no odds at all, please believe me.”

“But your boy ran away when he could not find your box. You will have no supper!—Youmustshare mine,” she proffered shyly. He gave a surreptitious glance at the wafery slices of beef and tomatoes, then answered with alacrity:

“Not at all, not at all. I wasn’t going to have any supper anyway. I’m—I’m not hungry.”

He had in fact decided that this was no time to put on exhibition the wolf that raged within him. And his manners being persuasive as well as pretty, he eventually convinced the lady of his sincerity, and she sat down to finish her supper alone while he departed with the air of a man with a mission—which was exactly what he was.

Straight as a homing pigeon he headed for the waggon of the wounded warriors. Most of them had already turned in, but the American surgeon, resting near the remains of a good meal, hailed him blithely:

“Hullo, Bet!”

“For the love of Michael Angelo give me a drink, and a wedge of bread and bully,” said the hapless Bet. “And send your animal of a Makalika to search every waggon until he finds Mrs Stannard’s box of provisions. When found, deliver to me.”

Later, his inner man replenished, he returned to McKinnon’s waggon with the air of a conqueror and the recovered box of provisions.

“Well! we’ve got it, Mrs Stannard!”

She looked up at him with such surprise that he wondered at first whether she had never expected to see it again. Then the truth occurred to him.

“I beg your pardon. But I was in Randal and Hallam’s the day you came in to do your shopping. You wouldn’t of course have noticed me,” (the expectant pause he made here was almost imperceptible), “but I was impertinent enough to inquire your name.”

“And you recognised me again?”

“There are some faces one never forgets,” he said quietly, but effectively. Looking up into his eyes, she saw there something which she had seen in the eyes of men before that night; and which always roused in her a longing to rub their noses in the dust.

“Let us hope they are not all crowned with hats,” she said laughingly. “Memory might be over-crowded.”

He was delighted with her. To be witty as well as pretty! That made the game worth the heat and toil of the chase! Thus they stood, the rose-lights from the fires about them, the great crushed pearl above them; taking each other’s measure, marking down each other’s weaknesses, and each secretly registering a vow to the other’s undoing. But they parted with the pleasant conventional phrases under which both good and bad intentions are so subtly concealed.

She breakfasted within sight the next morning, but he did not go near her, being content after having exchanged a morning greeting, to sit under his tree and reflect upon the ten good days to come. She made a charming picture in her dark short skirt, white blouse, and the rather rakish Panama he remembered so well as a feature of their first encounter in Randal’swinkel. She had brightened up wonderfully since then, he thought. Perhaps the relief of leaving all her domestic troubles behind her had something to do with it, but certainly disillusion had done no harm to her complexion so far, nor worry spoiled the fine line of her cheek and chin. Her looks had an edge to them that appealed to the connoisseur in him. It was not so much that she was pretty, as that she had good lines and that her clear pallor, the tilt of her head, and her dainty walk, carried an air of race and insolence with them; both things that meant something to a man like Bettington who admired the quality of insolence in women almost more than anything—probably because he knew how unworthy he was of anything but their insolent toleration.

Before the day’s trek began, there was a lot of gathering up and stowing away of belongings to be done, and it was natural that Bettington being on the spot should help Mrs Stannard.

Natural too that he should suggest a tramp ahead as per the example set by numerous other couples, all anxious to avoid the dust and monotony of the trek and get some exercise into the bargain. She tramped a little while with him, and he liked her long swinging walk, and found her mind as buoyant as her feet. When the boy who was perched on the brake of her waggon guarding little Aimée came running to report that the bébé was awake and crying, Bettington could have kicked him with the greatest blessing in the world. Moreover it occurred to him that babies were odious little beasts, and that no nice woman ought to saddle herself with such things.

But on later afternoons he blessed the pale and fretful Aimée, for without her as a chaperon he could not have sat hour after hour on the brake of Mrs Stannard’s waggon talking to her on every subject in the world but the one that filled his mind and was to be read plainly in his eyes by anyone who took the trouble to look deep enough.

Mrs Stannard was very careful to look neither deep nor long. Bettington came to the conclusion that she was a very clever woman, though he often wondered where she had got her experience. Marriage with Stannard might well have constituted an education, of a kind. But where had she learned that delightful way of assuming all the frank innocence of a young girl?—that lent such piquancy to the fact that she was really a married woman doing a bolt from her duties! And where achieved the subtle art of keeping a man with his toe to the chalk line, without wearing him out or allowing him to show his impatience for the starting bell? Bettington admired her almost to stupefaction for these things. At least it was to stupefaction he assigned the fact that he sometimes found himself sitting and gazing at her until the red crept in a little curly wave from her chin to the bronzy hair. Then indeed it was time to talk about literature, or make himself so useful and amusing to Aimée that Aimée’s mother would not have the heart to drive him away, under the pretext that she had a headache or that Aimée wanted to go to sleep.

She had beautiful eyes of an uncommon colour, rather like liquid amber, and as full of dots and dashes as a Marconi message, only far more interesting to read. So thought Bettington at least, and would have liked to spend a great deal of time in sorting out and classifying the natural shades and shadows in them from those brought flickering there by humour or melancholy or any other mood that seized her. When he found out one day by picking up a bracelet which belonged to her that she was called Amber, he rejoiced with his journalistic sense at the singular appropriateness of it, and that night found him lying under the waggon scribbling in his note-book a poem which began:

O amber heart, and amber eyes!

O amber heart, and amber eyes!

That the subject of it was sitting not far off in the gloaming shadows, hushing Aimée to sleep and looking rather like a gentle modern Madonna, lent the sting of secret and forbidden pleasure to his occupation. As Wilde says: “The simplest thing is a joy when it is secret!”

The one fly in the amber, so to speak, was Aimée. She was always on the spot, and as ubiquitous as only a baby less than a year old can be. True, Mrs Stannard commanded the services of a nurse-boy called September, but the latter was mostly busy with the pots and pans, and Aimée preferred the society of her mother or, failing that, of Bettington. Yes, much to his secret annoyance (and this secret was no joy) the little animal actually liked to sprawl over him, clutching at his moustache and poking her fingers in his ears and up his nose. Sometimes she howled for him to hush her to sleep, and once she refused to take her bottle unless he gave it to her! Another time she spilled her bottle all over his very spick and span breeches and gaiters, and upon that festival he could very willingly have killed and eaten her. Another and horrible occasion when he was lying peacefully on his rug under the waggon, with Amber Eyes sitting sewing on a water barrel near by, the baby crawled over to him, lolled upon him amorously and was sick amongst his hair! Amber released him from its clutches and he escaped to the river, but he hated to look back on that moment—it was not one of those in which he could truthfully claim to have been the master of his fate and the captain of his soul!

He never could make out what on earth Mrs Stannard saw in the little monkey to justify the amount of devotion she lavished on it. Many a time and oft, when tohismind a sound spanking would have filled the bill, he was astonished to see with what tenderness and patience Amber Eyes beguiled the peevish elf back to happiness. But, somehow, though it made him impatient he never could help liking her all the better for it. The trouble was that everything she did made him like her the better, but she gave no sign of being similarly affected, and the ten good days were speeding by with never a silver arrow nor a red rose to mark their flight! Five were already gone, and nothing achieved but this one-sided love affair with the abominable Aimée! When he came to think of it, it made him tired. After all, he was a man and a journalist, and something more he hoped to Gad, than food for babes and sucklings! What did Amber Eyes take him for? Having asked himself this question several times, he grew very broody, and wasted a sixth day in sulking.

This, he was delighted to note brought her to her bearings, and she began to give him more of her attention. Aimée, whose health was visibly improving from day to day, was handed over more often to the tender care of September, and Mrs Stannard and Bettington resumed their tramps ahead of the waggons, spending long afternoons and evenings in an intimacy that for two people who were nothing to each other would have been almost impossible anywhere else in the world except on the South African veld. None of the other people with the waggons made any comment, most of them being busy grinding little axes of their own, and the rest too full up with the weariness of life to care two bones how that fellow Bettington (who thought such a deuce of a lot of himself!) and Mrs Stannard (whom none of them knew) were occupying their time.

So that Bettington had quite a lot of

Time and place and woman altogether

Time and place and woman altogether

in which to reveal the other side of his soul to Amber Eyes. In fact, he felt that it was up to him to show her the kind of man she had been turning into a nurse-maid and mother’s help; and Bettington in the showing-off attitude was an entrancing spectacle. Fortunately, he sometimes became so interested in the mind of his listener that he forgot to “show off” and then she was really to be felicitated, for Bettington, once you got past a thin outer crust of conceit and arrogance, was an uncommonly clever fellow. In fact, in the matter of his work, he was something of a genius, and when a man has the star of genius glimmering—however faintly—within, a dozen good qualities will be sure to be found, like attendant satellites waiting upon it and throwing it into prominence. Furthermore, he loved his profession with a wholehearted love and knew the practising of it inside out, and up and down the earth, and backwards and forwards upon it, and most things that were to be known about literature past, present, and future. And to his intense satisfaction, Amber Eyes cared also for these things. Her mind had not been spoiled by shallow reading, for she had been educated with great simplicity, and since coming to Rhodesia had lived among men more familiar with sport and outdoor life than with intellectual matters. But she had a natural taste for literature and took to all things pertaining to it as a duck to water. Bettington found her mind not only ready to receive, but to retain what he could feed to it and thereafter to formulate opinions and convictions on what she had heard. He was greatly pleased with her, and as happy as a sparrow on a pump handle, until she went away from him to eat or sleep or mind the baby. Then, he poignantly remembered that it was not thus he had planned to spend the time between Umtali and Beira! What booted it to him to turn a pretty unhappy woman’s eyes inwards to the cultivation of her literary instincts instead of in his own direction? He derided himself for a duffer and was more tormented by the thought of imaginary silver arrows gone astray than was Saint Sebastian by the real steel-tipped article. He dreamed of red roses left ungathered by the roadside, and he wrote another poem.

It was at Massi-kessi that she found it lying loose between the leaves of a volume of Henley he had lent her, and she could not but read it for it wore her initials at its head:

You came and called me when the world was grey,You whispered of a land of endless May;Of flowers abloom, fair skies, birds always singing:And I, half-listening, lingered on my way.Yes, I half-lingered with a troubled heart,Your dearest sweetness had a touch of smart!Ever at fall of eve I heard the tollingOf Life’s grim curfew bidding us to part.Ah! was it well to take the lonelier way?To thrust with prudent hands the cup away,To leave the harvest of your heart ungarnered,And all the precious treasure of our love to pay?

You came and called me when the world was grey,You whispered of a land of endless May;Of flowers abloom, fair skies, birds always singing:And I, half-listening, lingered on my way.Yes, I half-lingered with a troubled heart,Your dearest sweetness had a touch of smart!Ever at fall of eve I heard the tollingOf Life’s grim curfew bidding us to part.Ah! was it well to take the lonelier way?To thrust with prudent hands the cup away,To leave the harvest of your heart ungarnered,And all the precious treasure of our love to pay?

When she had read it, she gave a curious, furious little laugh and said,

“What abominable impertinence!”

But if Bettington could have seen the colour in her cheeks he would have counted unto himself the first red rose.

They left the waggons at Massi-kessi for it was the railway terminus from the coast and they were all to embark next day on the Portuguese train for a journey through Portuguese territory. In the meantime, most of the travellers—for the sake of sleeping in a bed again, and eating a dinner cooked on a stove and served on a table—adjourned to the corrugated-iron hotel which stood bleak and blue in the midst of a waste of sands. Mrs Stannard and her baby were amongst those who went over, and, needless to say, Bettington followed the trail. He spent a good deal of the morning arranging themenufor an exclusive little dinner party composed of himself and Mrs Stannard. It was a charming dinner too and themenua great success, though it embraced nothing more original than a fried sole, lamb cutlets with green vegetables, a sweet omelette, fresh fruit for dessert, and a bottle of wine on ice. This does not sound pretentious, but in the “good old times” in Rhodesia people never saw fresh fruit or fresh fish from one month’s end to another; goat was the only meat ever available and ice a thing remembered only in fevered dreams as a feature of life in some far-away fair land of a long-ago existence. Wherefore Bettington and his guest dinedchezLucullus that evening, and felt very well and happy after it as they sat with a dozen other people on the cool dark stoep, or strolled up and down the one long street of sand. There was a huge mountain of wool-bales lying ready for transportation just beside the hotel, and Amber Eyes, who for some reason was as gay as a canary in a golden cage, had a fancy for climbing this mountain and sitting on its summit, so as to get as near the stars as possible, she said. Their two cigarette tips were the only points of light in the vapoury darkness. She had never smoked a cigarette in her life before, and this fact refreshed the jaded heart of Bettington, accustomed to women who mostly smoked too many. They sat talking there, under the stars and their old friend the crushed pearl who arrived late, until after midnight, and he beguiled her with brilliant tongue and words sweeter than honey in the honeycomb. But her hand was never once within reach of his. Neither did she confide in him that her husband was a brute! Certainly she was an original woman!

Since none of the usual confidences were forthcoming from her direction then, Bettington began to unfold (so eloquently that he almost believed it himself) on the poignant loneliness and misery of such a lot in life as his. But his word pictures evoked nothing better from her than silvery giggles, and after she had had enough, she took a firm hand on the reins once more, and turned his nose into the safe fields of literature and adventure. He had tired of these subjects and was a little inclined to fall into gloom when she would not listen to the tales of his woes, but she was so gay and sparkly it seemed a pity to dim her pleasure, and churlish not to sparkle and be gay with her. So he bottled up his emotions for the time being, though he did not omit to put as much of them as he dared into his good-night handshake. He possessed very firm magnetic hands and had rather specialised in the use of them in cases where speech was not permitted.

He slept badly that night. It seemed to him that, in spite of all the good fun he got out of his success as a soldier of fortune and journalist, he was missing some vital thing in life and he could not bear it. He hated missing things. It made him feel like the “weariest river” making a bee-line for the nearest sea.

In the tender sunshine of early morning, they took train for the coast. The carriages were two long narrow affairs on a two-foot gauge, built like tram-cars, with seats running down the sides and the passengers sitting in two lines facing each other. Amber Eyes and her baby had a seat in a corner of the men’s compartment because for one reason, Aimée could not bear to be separated from her unwilling love, Bettington, and for another because in the other compartment a woman was too critically ill to be able to bear the noise of a little child.

Hour by hour, the tender sunshine of dawn developed into smiting, biting heat that blistered the paint on the roof above their heads. Some of the men slept uneasily and some sat wrapt in reflection. Bettington could have done with an idle hour himself, but Aimée kept him busy. She sprawled and clambered on him, and banged his watch against his nose. He would have liked to banghernose on the floor, but the fact that Amber Eyes in her corner grew paler and paler every moment, drooping like a flower in the heat, kept a galvanised smile on his face. If he did not look after Aimée she would torment her mother, and that contingency was not to be thought of. But oh! how he would have enjoyed pushing the little worm out of the window,—and probably would have done it if it could have been engineered without suspicion attaching to himself. He saw some of the wounded warriors exchanging facetious smiles as Aimée tore his hair, whooping like a Comanchee on the war-path, and could only glare at them and curse inwardly, meditating on the revenge he would take out of their pockets on the voyage down coast.

“I’ll rook them of every red cent at poker,” he promised savagely. “I’ll make them cough up their last bone!”

Towards afternoon Aimée felt seedy, and despite all his efforts to keep her, climbed over to Amber Eyes and lay lamenting in her arms. Then did Bettington sitting forward, contort his face and do strange tricks with his fingers, and almost burst himself in the effort to amuse her. But nothing was any good. She would stare for a moment with her large slate-coloured eyes, then they would fill up and brim over with tears, even while they remained wide open and observant, and she lamented like a banshee. Sometimes she screwed herself into a ball and ejected sharp barking sounds, and sometimes she lengthened herself into a plank that would not be bent up again; but always at spasmodic intervals she howled. The heat beat down through the carriage roof on to the cooped-up travellers and came in sweltering waves through the open windows. Mrs Stannard grew paler than ever and great purple shadows lay like pansies under the amber eyes. Suddenly her hold on the baby relaxed and the latter rolled on to the floor. Some other man picked her up and comforted her as best he might while Bettington made play with the water bottle and brandy flask. After a little while, Mrs Stannard recovered and rewarded him with a pale smile and stammering apology.

“I am ashamed. It is too bad of us—first Aimée and now me. How you must hate us!”

It was at about that time that Bettington began to realise that he loved her. The real thing had got hold of him at last. He wished he could take her in his arms and kiss away her troubles and her tears forever. He would have given his skin to sole her shoes with. He wished he could die for her. But he only turned very pale himself, and set his arrogant jaw, and took Aimée on his knees and hushed her, and didn’t give a damn any more what the other men thought, and prayed for the end of that infernal journey as he had never prayed for anything in his life.

At length, the weary day drew to a close, and in the hot darkness the train pulled up at Fontes-Villa, which is—or was in those days—a unique little corrugated-iron Hades situated on one of the best malarial and mosquito sites in the world. The swamp on which it stood sizzling resembled a large stage carpet made of coarse artificial grass and rushes dyed a bright green by the arsenate-of-copper process. Sliding past in stealthy grim silence, full of crocodiles, and germs, and green slime, was the Pungwe River.

Here the train stood brooding for some hours as if considering the advisability of a midnight plunge. No one seemed to know what was going to happen next, and no one cared much. Enough that after the waggling, jerking, switch-back movements that had prevailed all day there was quiescence. A turgid, heavily-smelling breeze of sorts that meandered unwillingly through the long compartment seemed a heaven-sent zephyr, and everything would have been beautiful if only Aimée had not been vile. She continued her clamourings with renewed energy, and Amber Eyes said that she needed a bottle and that if Bettington would hold the poor little thing she would go and find September and send him up to the hotel (if there was one) to get warm water and mix a bottle of condensed milk. Naturally Bettington volunteered to go and lug out September himself from the truck in which the native boys were sleeping. After an interval then, September arrived with the mixed bottle and Aimée got her supper. But before she was half through it, Amber Eyes discovered that the water was stone cold and would probably be the cause of cramps in Aimée’s anatomy for the rest of the voyage. Again the luckless Bettington went a-hunting for September, but this time the quest was unsuccessful of any result except the news that both September and his own boy Bat had made up their mysterious and labyrinthian minds that they did not care to proceed further on the journey, therefore had taken their blankets and headed back for Umtali. Another thing that Bettington learned was that September had not gone to the hotel at all for water for the baby’s bottle, nor even looked for an hotel, but had simply slunk down to the river’s edge, shipped a bottle of the grey-green slime and mixed itau naturelwith the condensed milk. This information the journalist kept to himself. He did not think it would be of the slightest use to Mrs Stannard, and if Aimée were poisoned—tant pisfor Aimée! But he doubted there being any such luck. Aimée, he felt convinced, was destined to live to be the scourge of other fine men.

His next job was to go up to the hotel himself and get hot water to make the bottle. Even that was better than sitting still in the little devildom Aimée was creating in the compartment since she found herself robbed of the solacing bottle. Besides Bettington was getting used to his job, even as eels get used to skinning.

One thing to the good was that when hediddiscover the hotel and rouse the inmates he was able to achieve a whiskey and soda, and sandwich for himself, and bear back similar trophies to the fainting and haggard Amber Eyes. As for Aimée, she had her bottle at last, and Bettington felt that the whole noble army of martyrs were not in the running with him. “And after all these vices there was peace!”

Just as silence and slumber were spreading their wings over the weary caravan, the railway officials appeared from nowhere and briskly routed the passengers out in a great hurry to cross the river on a pont and embark on another train waiting on the further side. Ensued a great struggle and scramble after baggage. Eventually the change was accomplished and the journey continued until arrival at the Beira station.

It was for the passengers to find out for themselves that the station was about two miles away from the only possible hotel, and the country between of the roughest kind of veld—all scrub, hillocks, bush, and ant-holes; that there were no conveyances or porters; and that it was up to every man to shoulder his own pack and foot it for home. And it was for Bettington, the brilliant journalist, fascinating man of the world, and gifted poet, to take up the White Man’s Burden once more. With Aimée in his arms, a basket containing Aimée’s impedimenta on his back, his own knapsack slung about his waist, and Amber Eyes laden with smaller articles bringing up the rear, he felt like a prehistoric man on a forced march for fair pastures and better hunting. And in his heart he was saying:

“I may as well take on the job for good! I’ve become a family man. I’ve got used to fixing baby’s bottle now and lugging her around. Oh, pot!”

All round them, struggling in the dimness over ant-hill and ant-bear hole, were other baggage-laden forms, faithfully padding the hoof. The “wounded bunch,” as became warriors were making light of their woes. From their ranks came an occasional laugh and snatches of a ribald song set to the opening bars of the “Soldier’s March” inFaust, accompanied by bang and boom of a tin pannikin and some hollow article (perhaps a bread box?)

Drunk (bang!) last night,Drunk the night before (boom!)Drunk (bang!) last night,Never get drunk any more! (Boom!)

Drunk (bang!) last night,Drunk the night before (boom!)Drunk (bang!) last night,Never get drunk any more! (Boom!)

Bettington felt that he was different to these men. Nobler in some sort. Between them and him lay a great gulf fixed. He had deeper depths and could rise to higher heights. Thank God he was not as these!

Eventually they reached the hotel and Amber Eyes having engaged a room disappeared with the baby and Bettington was his own man once more. He in turn engaged himself a room, and went to bed, to dream that he had a baby of his own and was going to take in washing to earn his living.

As no steamer awaited them at Beira, the passengers from Rhodesia had to amuse themselves as best they might until a steamer turned up. No difficult feat this. Beira also was a corrugated-iron Hades, but at least the verandah of the Royal Hotel was deep and cool and palm-shaded; and there were supplies of fresh fish and fruit; and ice to clink in the glass; and though the sea was chocolate-coloured and “jiggers” hid in the sands, itwasthe sea, and it smelled of home, and brought memories of far-away joys that were getting nearer! Anyway, it was good to be leaving Rhodesia and trouble behind, with faces set to a new horizon where trouble had not yet materialised! So thought most of the travellers. And perhaps it was the philosophy of Amber Eyes too, and perhaps that was why she so visibly brightened and bloomed. All was well with Aimée as Bettington had opined, in spite of Pungwe River germs, and all was well with the world.

Only Bettington was troubled in his mind. He too had a philosophy that, so far, had helped him to waggle his way pretty well through a weary world, but for the moment it seemed to be suffering from a weak spine. His philosophy had always been to desire things and he would get them, especially if he gave Fate a leg up every now and again, and reached out far enough. True the leg up sometimes hit him a clout in the eye, and the reached-out hand sometimes got its fingers burned; but that was all in the day’s shooting and part of the game. The main point was that always in the long run he had got what he greatly desired.

And now it did not look as if things were going to work out that way! He found himself desiring something that was already in the possession of someone else—for “better or worse, for richer or poorer!” He who had made up his mind never to have a wife and baby of his own, was now hankering to take possession of the wife and baby of someone else! The thing was ridiculous of course. It was so silly that he could even laugh at it himself.

“What a fool I should look carting Stannard’s baby round the world. Blow that Aimée! After all, if I’m going to be a nurse-maid, surely I can get a baby of my own to mind!”

Yes, he could laugh and gibe at it himself, but even in the act of doing so something gripped him round the heart and made him feel physically sick. It was the thought of the day when he would see the Amber Eyes no more! Wherefore he gazed into them all that day as much as decency permitted, and a trifle over. He was overjoyed to see that she could no longer return his gaze with her frank, disarming glance of girlish innocence. A bird sang in his breast every time the colour sprang into her cheek under his hardy eye.

She had got another nurse-boy for the baby and so had a little liberty in which to roam about Beira, looking at the coolie curio-shops, and riding on the trollies that ran up and down the town. She bought herself an Indian silk shirt of delicate rainbow tints softly blending into one another, and he acquired a set of six twisted gold bangles for an imaginary sister, and a little one for Aimée. Then he wanted to give Amber Eyes a little black ebony walking-stick knobbed and tipped with ivory. But she would not have it.

“Not even a little remembrance of our journey down?” he pleaded.

“It looks like amemento mori,” she protested.

“It will be one if you use it to walk away from me.”

“I am able to do that without the use of a crutch,” she laughed.

“I daresay. What you arenotable to do is to prevent me from following, even if I have to come on crutches.”

“Surely you are too clever a man to waste your time?”

She turned away from him with a bright cheek, leaving no time for a response. Not that he had a response ready. He was not quite sure whether hewasa clever man or not, nor whether he stood on his head or his heels. But he meant to keep his balance. And he did—right up to nine o’clock that night.

At that time he was seated beside her in a trolley car which also contained half a dozen other people bent on a moonlight drive. The little bag she carried slipped to the floor and in stooping to recover it for her in the contracted space his face touched her knee whereon lay her hand. Under an uncontrollable impulse he pressed his lips to it. She instantly drew it away, and they sat in silence for a moment. Then, below the noise of the trolley wheels she heard his voice very low and vibrating:

“Amber, I love you!”

She stared straight ahead, making no kind of response. He was left to wonder whether or not she had heard, and obliged to assume an air of calm he did not feel. A little of the red had slipped out of his complexion before they reached the end of the drive, but also his jaw had taken on its most dogged look, and as they all dismounted and began to stroll towards the hotel he said with the quiet deliberation of the man who means to have his way:

“Walk down to the little bridge with me, please. I must speak to you.”

“It is getting late,” she demurred.

“I shall not keep you long.”

They walked in silence, their feet slipping and slithering in the loose sand, until they reached the bridge; then stopped to lean on the low parapet and stare down at the water just below.

“You heard what I said in the car?” he asked.

Perhaps she thought he was addressing the fishes for she made no answer. Then very quietly he said again:

“I love you, Amber!”

There was a great stillness between them. Truly as the wise people of old held, to give a man the use of your name is to give him power over you! He felt that he had power over her and perhaps that was why her hand lying on the bridge rail trembled, though her voice was quite level.

“Why do you call me by that name, Mr Bettington?”

“Because I love you, woman with the amber eyes, and the amber hair, and the clear amber heart,” he said gently and strongly, and took her hands in his. “And I think that you love me.”

“You are mistaken,” she said coldly, drawing away her hands.

The light went out of his face like a quenched flame. He turned away and leaned heavily on the bridge. She continued calmly:

“You merely have for me the terrible charm that a bad man has for a woman when he is the first bad man she has ever known.”

“Me?” cried Bettington, forgetting dignity and grammar and everything else in genuine astonishment. “I’m not bad! I like that! What about Stannard?”

She seemed flabbergasted for a moment, then:

“How generous you are!” she said scornfully. “Besides he is not really a bad man, only a weak one.”

“One bad man is worth forty weak ones,” averred Bettington bitterly. He was astonished and indignant at the line the conversation had taken.

“I do not deny that there is much good in you,” she said more kindly. “I can never forget how kind you have been on the journey down. When I think of all the things you did for me and Aimée I hardly know how to thank you.”

“Don’t try,” he interrupted. “I did nothing any man wouldn’t have done for you.”

He had to gulp all the same, thinking of Aimée and her bottles and her bag of impedimenta.

“And now you spoil it all,” she said sorrowfully. “By taking me for one of those hateful, disloyal women to whom any man may make love the moment she is out of her husband’s sight!”

“In all humility I beg you to forgive me,” said Bettington.

There was no doubt about it that for once in his life he was getting the worst of it, but somehow he minded that fact less than he minded the tightening grip round his heart. In grim earnest, now, he heard “the tolling of Life’s curfew” bidding them to part, and he wondered what he should do with the rest of his life. She had not quite finished rubbing his nose in the dust.

“How can I forgive you? I should not consider myself worthy of the worst or weakest man in the world if I were such a woman as you thought.”

But Bettington’s nose was too sore for any further ill-treatment. His natural combativeness began to reassert itself.

“I didn’t think anything,” he said moodily. “I just couldn’t help loving you, that’s all. If you want me to abase myself any more, Amber, say so, and I’ll do it. But that won’t prevent me from going on loving you.”

She intimated with great dignity that she wished nothing further of him but the courtesy of his escort back to the hotel. They returned in silence, but at the door of the stoep, just as she was on the point of going in, she said quietly:

“I may as well tell you that my name is Juliet. Amber is my sister’s name.”

That was the last straw! He went away raging. How could he have wasted the golden treasure of his heart on her? She was one of those coldblooded brutes of women who think they can do anything they like with men—(instead of letting men do anything they like with them!) He thought he should never feel better again, except after a bottle of Guinness’s mixed with a pint of champagne. But even that had a less satisfactory effect than usual.

No sign of her for the greater part of next day, and discreet inquiry of Rupee, the new nurse-boy, elicited the fact that she was resting with a bad headache. For some occult reason the information cheered Bettington wonderfully. The steamer that was to take them all down to Durban arrived, and he and some of the warrior men went down to choose their cabins for the next day’s departure. Bettington knew the Captain well, and accepted an invitation to lunch. He had a sort of feeling that by so doing he was scoring off the falsely-called Amber. She should see that though she didn’t want him somebody else did,—if it was only the Captain of a Union-Castle liner. He knew the feeling was childish, but he had it all the same.

When he got back to the hotel, there she was sitting in the verandah. She went on writing her letters and pretended not to see him, so he got a newspaper and pretended to read it. This state of affairs continued for a long time, until an interruption came in the shape of a Cape cart with four spanking mules which pulled up before the hotel. A little hardy blue-eyed woman descended, and Bettington immediately recognised in her a lady whom he knew very well. She was the wife of a South African railway contractor, and the Madame Sans Gêne of Salisbury, from whence she and her husband had evidently just driven in their own conveyance. She did not see Bettington at once, but pounced on Amber Eyes and shook her hand vigorously.

“How do, Miss van Rimmel? We came through Umtali and I saw your sister, Mrs Stannard. She loaded me with loving messages for you. I also have a parcel for the baby. Hope she’s fit?”

“Ah! Thank you,” cried Amber Eyes, and looked over the other woman’s shoulder to where Bettington stood with mouth open and eyes starting in his head. “My sister’s baby is very well. I had such excellent help with her on the way down.”

“Good! Mrs Stannard was rather anxious as to how you would manage. Stan is getting along fine, and they hope to join you and Aimée in Durban much sooner than they expected. Hullo, Bet! Whatyoudoing here?”

Bettington came forward and made such genuflections as were expected of him. His eyes had resumed their normal position, and his mouth was now trimmed with a sarcastic smile. But it is fair to say that the sarcasm was at his own expense. When Mrs Paulton had gone in and left them alone, he said gravely:

“I hope it gave you great pleasure to make a fool of me?”

“To do one’s duty should always be pleasant,” she responded with a ghost of a smile in her eye.

“Do you think you played quite fair?”

“Do you thinkyoudid? Because I look like my sister, and borrow her Panama, and wear her bangle, are those any reasons why you should take me for a married woman—and a disloyal one at that?”

Bettington had to take his medicine like a man. The best he could do was to mutter with a pious eye that he “thanked God she was not.”

“I thank God too,” she said inflexibly. But a little later she added more kindly:

“Perhaps we both rather meanly took advantage of private information.”

“I don’t know what inexpiable things you could have heard about me?” he asked reproachfully, secure in a sense of self-righteousness.

“When I persuaded my sister to let me go at the last moment instead of herself, Mr Randal gave me a brief résumé of your character and career. No doubt he thought it might interest me to know something of the man whose waggon I was to share.”

Ah! He almost wished he had time to go back to Umtali for a few days. Yet he really could not feel very mad with Randal or anyone else. Life looked so beguilingly fair all at once. His heart was light as a cork, but he pitched his voice to a becomingly humble key.

“Don’t you think we might begin again from quite a new basis?” he asked, looking at her with all the arrogance gone out of his eyes. “Without remembering any secret information or old scores?”

She considered a little while with downcast eyes, and a faint flush in her cheek. At last: “All right,” she said softly. Then added reflectively: “Aimée will want a lot of looking after on the voyage.”

But Bettington’s spirit was not quite broken.

“No!” he said clearly and firmly, “I bar Aimée.”

“Sheisrather a little reptile,” said Aimée’s aunt.

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