le played about the corners of Meryl's mouth.
"I thought you could not possibly return from Segundi for a week?"

She looked away as she said it, so she could not see the swift
contraction of his face and the swift gleam in his eyes. For one
moment, of all things in heaven and earth, he felt suddenly that he
wanted to take her in his arms and kiss her--roughly perhaps; yes,
roughly and masterfully, for daring to aim her little shaft at him.
Instead he replied gravely, "I had to come, because Mr. Jardine wanted
Grenville's opinion on a particular native question, and it was a
difficult matter to explain in a letter."

"Then I mustn't hinder you." And she stood aside. "Of course you are
thinking of starting back to-night and are in a great hurry?"

And then for once the man's armour failed him. "No, I am not going
back to-night, and I am not in any special hurry. If you were going on
to the top of the kopje, may I come with you?"

XVII

AN EVENING CONVERSATION

As they climbed slowly up the zigzag path, neither of them troubled to
make conversation. All in a moment it had come back--mysteriously,
unaccountably--the sense of understanding, the quiet kinship of
minds--for her, the sudden utter content at his nearness. While he was
there beside her, by his own seeking, what did the future matter?--the
future might wait. It is generally so with women. In the "afterwards,"
the deepest pain is usually theirs, because it is not given them to
break away and drown the ache and the longing in action and change;
but in the present, if he, the loved, is with her, she can forget so
much in that blessed sense of nearness. The man's ache, perhaps,
spreads more uniformly over both presence and absence, for in each,
for him, there is the very human craving to possess.

So they reached the summit, and stood a moment gazing at the prospect
outspread. A sunset in a novel has become too banal for repetition; it
seems, indeed, almost the last word in literary mediocrity; and yet at
the evening hour in Rhodesia, in September, when the rains are nearly
due, and great masses of cloud begin to gather on the horizon, there
is again and again a pageant of wonder and colouring to steep man's
senses afresh at every renewal, as if it was the first time of
beholding. Nothing banal, nothing mediocre in the actual
phenomenon--just a riot of colouring, a riot of splendour, a riot of
revelation. It is not a glory in the west spreading a litt