yet determined, face. It was not quite handsome. The features were not
regular, the forehead was perhaps a little too low, and the hair grew
very thick, and would have been a vast mane if it had not been kept
fairly close by his valet. This valet was Krool, a
half-caste--Hottentot and Boer--whom he had rescued from Lobengula in
the Matabele war, and who had in his day been ship-steward, barber,
cook, guide, and native recruiter. Krool had attached himself to Byng,
and he would not be shaken off even when his master came home to
England.

Looking at her visitor with a new sense of observation alive in her,
Jasmine saw the inherent native drowsiness of the nature, the love of
sleep and good living, the healthy primary desires, the striving,
adventurous, yet, in one sense, unambitious soul. The very cleft in the
chin, like the alluring dimple of a child's cheek, enlarged and
hardened, was suggestive of animal beauty, with its parallel suggestion
of indolence. Yet, somehow, too ample as he was both in fact and by
suggestion to the imagination there was an apparent underlying force, a
capacity to do huge things when once roused. He had been roused in his
short day. The life into which he had been thrown with men of vaster
ambition and much more selfish ends than his own, had stirred him to
prodigies of activity in those strenuous, wonderful, electric days when
gold and diamonds changed the hard-bitten, wearied prospector, who had
doggedly delved till he had forced open the hand of the Spirit of the
Earth and caught the treasure that flowed forth, into a millionaire,
into a conqueror, with the world at his feet. He had been of those who,
for many a night and many a year, eating food scarce fit for Kaffirs,
had, in poverty and grim endeavour, seen the sun rise and fall over the
Magaliesberg range, hope alive in the morning and dead at night. He had
faced the devilish storms which swept the high veld with lightning and
the thunderstone, striking men dead as they fled for shelter to the
boulders of some barren, mocking kopje; and he had had the occasional
wild nights of carousal, when the miseries and robberies of life and
time and the ceaseless weariness and hope deferred, were forgotten.

It was all there in his face--the pioneer endeavour, the reckless
effort, the gambler's anxiety, the self-indulgence, the crude passions,
with a far-off, vague idealism, the selfish outlook, and yet great
breadth of feeling, with narrowness