of her orthodox girlhood, and in spite of all impatience,
recognised his sanctity. When he had disappeared she went into her
bedroom. What he had said, indeed, was no discovery. She had known.
Oh! She had known. 'Why didn't I accept Jimmy's offer? Why didn't I
marry him? Is it too late?' she thought. 'Could I? Would he--even
now?' But then she started away from her own thought. Marry him! knowing
his heart was with this girl?

She looked long at her face in the mirror, studying with a fearful
interest the little hard lines and markings there beneath their light
coating of powder. She examined the cunning touches of colouring matter
here and there in her front hair. Were they cunning enough? Did they
deceive? They seemed to her suddenly to stare out. She fingered and
smoothed the slight looseness and fulness of the skin below her chin.
She stretched herself, and passed her hands down over her whole form,
searching as it were for slackness, or thickness. And she had the bitter
thought: 'I'm all out. I'm doing all I can.' The lines of a little poem
Fort had showed her went thrumming through her head:

"Time, you old gipsy man
Will you not stay
Put up your caravan
Just for a day?"

What more could she do? He did not like to see her lips reddened. She
had marked his disapprovals, watched him wipe his mouth after a kiss,
when he thought she couldn't see him. 'I need'nt!' she thought. 'Noel's
lips are no redder, really. What has she better than I? Youth--dew on
the grass!' That didn't last long! But long enough to "do her in" as
her soldier-men would say. And, suddenly she revolted against herself,
against Fort, against this chilled and foggy country; felt a fierce
nostalgia for African sun, and the African flowers; the happy-go-lucky,
hand-to-mouth existence of those five years before the war began. High
Constantia at grape harvest! How many years ago--ten years, eleven
years! Ah! To have before her those ten years, with him! Ten years in
the sun! He would have loved her then, and gone on loving her! And she
would not have tired of him, as she had tired of those others. 'In half
an hour,' she thought, 'he'll be here, sit opposite me; I shall see him
struggling forcing himself to seem affectionate! It's too humbling! But
I don't care; I want him!'

She searched her wardrobe, for some garment or touch of colour, novelty
of any sort, to help her.