e, his dead love Joan--looking at him out of this
girl's beautiful eyes, touching him with this girl's slender hands,
speaking to him from this stranger's lips? It was impossible--impossible;
all the careful training of that fifteen years in exile would be undone.
His very life would be undermined again. For the moment it seemed
incredible, preposterous. He felt stunned by it.

Then his rigid self-control came to his aid, and his face grew stern
and hard.

The preposterous thing was that he should let a chance resemblance hit
him so; should even admit the possibility of being undone after all
his careful self-training. No, a thousand times no; he was not such a
weak fool as that. The strength he had won was his still. He had only
to go on being resolute and cold and the past would lie down again,
and once more go quietly to sleep.

He defied it to overcome him now. By every agonised pang, by every
hour of unfathomable bitterness, by every solitary year of self-chosen
exile, he insisted that he must prevail. He strode on, scarcely seeing
anything about him, and his face grew sterner and sterner. Then he
came within sight of the camping-place, and saw the white tent, and
Stanley giving directions, while Moore and some black boys unpacked
things from the ambulance.

And he thought he would get more complete control of himself before he
joined them; take this thing fairly by the throat and throttle it,
that he might regain his peace of mind absolutely before the second
encounter with the owner of the face and form that seemed for a moment
to have made an upheaval in his life. So he turned aside and made for
the temple, feeling glad and relieved at the consciousness that the
mood was passing, and reassured that, being no more taken by surprise,
he would successfully master it. Probably he could still go away on
the morrow, and once away, Rhodesia would take him to her heart again.
He knew it full well. Every day now the country was giving back to him
of what he had given to her; lulling him, soothing him, revivifying
him with her freshness and her charm.

But his mind was very occupied still and his vision clouded as he
passed into the cool shade of the temple, and he did not see a small,
dainty person with an impish face perched high on a broken wall, with
her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands, and a queer,
fitful, half-serious, half-bored expression in her dark eyes. Instead,
seeing no one and thinking hi