h lay between the Mission Station and Zimbabwe's lofty northern
mountain, Meryl walked slowly, with a sense of desolation she could
neither gauge nor dispel; and over and over through her mind as she
looked to the far kopjes passed the lines of England's strong
woman-poet, Emily Bronte:

"What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?
More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes _one_ human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell."

What have those lonely mountains worth revealing? was the dumb,
inarticulate cry in her heart. Ah! what?... what?... And it seemed as
if all the loneliness in the world were brooding over the blue kopje
and over the spot where the ancient ruins lay, and creeping into her
heart and her life for ever.

Would he ever come again, that grim soldier-policeman, who just once
or twice had shown her a glimpse of the strong man's heart behind the
barrier, and the strong man's everlasting charm?... Or was it indeed
all finished for ever? Just an episode that came and went and had no
sequel, except in that brooding sense of a great loneliness upon the
distant hills and upon the path of her life. She told herself again
that it must be so; that evidently the momentary softness had been
only passing moods; that she counted for nothing at all to him, not
even a friend it was worth while saying "good-bye" to.

With the deep sadness still in her face she turned, because a step was
approaching round a tall boulder beside her. And a moment later she
was looking full and deep into Peter Carew's eyes.

"You?..." she said. "_You?_ ..." as if she could not believe her own
eyes.

He said nothing. Suddenly speech seemed to have gone from him, but an
expression in his face that was new to her quickened her pulses with a
strange glad quickening.

After a moment he spoke, and it was as though his whole expression and
figure stiffened.

"I did not expect to find you here," he said. "I was told you had gone
with your father."

"Not I; Diana only." And her eyes fell, and a faint colour dyed her
cheeks.

There was a moment's awkward pause: she remembering his unceremonious
departure, wondering at his unceremonious return; he nonplussed at the
trick Fate had played him, bringing him again, in spite of his
decision, into the sphere of her beauty and her quiet charm.

"I was going to the Grenvilles'," he told her at last.

And suddenly a tiny smi