propelled by a nurse in starched white skirts and flying white
bonnet-strings--a nurse who kept her head well down, and was evidently
reading a novel as she went. Some yards in advance a red umbrella bobbed
against the breeze like a giant poppy on a very short stem. The lady who
carried the flaming object was young; that much was plain, for the
fluttering heliotrope chiffons of her gown were held at a high, perhaps at
an unnecessarily lofty, altitude above the powdery sand, and her
plumply-filled and gleaming stockings of scarlet, fantastically barred
with black, and her dainty little high-heeled shoes were very much in
evidence as they topped a rising crest. Then they disappeared over the
farther edge, the red umbrella followed, and the nurse, in charging up the
steep after her mistress, discovered, perhaps by a glance of investigation
underneath the canopy, prompted by a too tardy realisation of the
suspicious lightness of the perambulator, that the shell was void of the
pearl.

Lynette heard the wretched woman's piercing shriek, glimpsed the red
umbrella as it reappeared over the sand-crest, comprehended the horrible
consternation of mistress and maid. She must signal to them--cry out....
Involuntarily she gave the call of the Kaffir herd: the shrill, prolonged
ululation that carries from spitzkop to spitzkop across the miles of
karroo or high-grass veld between. And she unpinned her hat and waved it,
standing amongst the thickly-growing poppies and chamomile on the high
crest of the sand-wave, while her shadow--a squat, blue dwarf with arms
out of all proportion--flourished and gesticulated at her feet.

LXX

It is Fate who comes hurrying to Lynette under the becoming shadow of a
red umbrella, on the starched and rustling skirts of the agitated nurse,
whose mouth is seen to be shaping sentences long before she can be heard
panting:

"Did you call, 'm? Her ladyship thought you did, and might have found ...
Oh, ma'am! have you seen a baby? We've lost ours!"

Lynette nods and laughs reassuringly, pointing down into the hollow. The
nurse, with a squawk of relief, leaves her perambulator bogged in the
sand, flutters up the powdery rise like some large species of seagull,
squawks again, and swoops to retrieve her lost charge. Miss Baby,
perfectly contented until the scarlet face and whipping ribbons of her
attendant appear over the edge of her Paradise, throws herself backwards,
strikes out with kicking, di