er left hand like a beneficent
presence. Delicate ferns and ice-plants sprang from its chinks and
crannies. The long fronds of the sparaxis bowed at her small, brown-shod
feet, some bearing seed-pods, others rows of pink bells, or yellow--a
fairy chime. In the damper hollows iris bloomed, and the gold and scarlet
sword-flowers stood in martial ranks, and gaily-plumaged finches were
sidling on overhanging boughs, or dipping and drinking in the shallows.
The wattled starlings whistled to each other, or fought as starlings will.
A grey partridge was bathing in the hot dry sand between the reed-beds and
the bank, and in the deeper pools the barbel were rising at the flies.
There was no sound but the running water. The spicy smell of aromatic
leaves and the honeyed perfume of a great climbing trumpet-flower made the
air languorous with sweetness.

He answered her now.

"You are here, and I am here. And for me that means everything. And I feel
that I want nothing more, and, still, such a tremendous lot besides."

He breathed as though he had been running, and his sharply-cut nostrils
quivered. His white teeth gleamed under the clipped golden moustache.

Perhaps it made his charm the more definite and irresistible that in
these days of storm, and stress, and hardship and peril, his handsome face
was never without its gay, confident smile. His tall, athletic figure, in
the neat workmanlike Service dress that suited him so well, leaned towards
her eagerly. He kept his clear eyes on her face, with the direct
simplicity of a child's gaze, but the look bred in her a delicious terror.
The perfume of youth and health, of vigour and virility, that exhaled from
him, came to her mingled with the scent of the crushed spice-leaves and
the perfume of the waxen-belled heaths and the breath of the giant
trumpet-flower. She was turning dizzy. She could scarcely stand.

"I--I will sit down," she murmured, and he beat the grasses at the foot of
the great granite slab and prodded in chinks and crannies for snakes and
tarantulas; and when she sank down with a faint sigh of relief, threw
himself at her feet with a careless, powerful grace, and lay there looking
up at her, worshipping the golden lights that gleamed through the thick
dark eyelashes, and the sweet shadows under them, and her little pointed
chin.

The lace-trimmed frills of a white cambric petticoat peeped under the hem
of her green cloth skirt; below there was a glimpse of slend