on. They all seem to tumble when she comes along.
I say, Bayfield, you'll be the next."

"When I am I'll tell you," was the placid reply. "Let's go round to the
kraals."

------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Well, Hilary, and how am I looking? Rather well, don't you think?"

She was dressed quite simply, but prettily, and wore a plain but very
becoming hat. The brisk, clear cold suited her dark style, and had lent
colour to her cheeks and a sparkle to her eyes--and the expression of
the latter now, as she turned them upon her companion, was very soft.

"Yes. Rather well," he answered, not flinching from her gaze, yet not
responding to it.

"More than `rather' well, you ought to say," she smiled. "And now,
Hilary, what have you been doing since we parted? Tell me all about
yourself."

Most men would have waxed indignant over her cool effrontery in putting
things this way. This one, she knew, would do nothing of the sort. If
anything, it rather amused him.

"Doing? Well, I began by nearly dying of fever. Would have quite, if
Sybrandt hadn't tumbled in by accident and pulled me through it."

"Poor old Hilary!--What are you laughing at?"

"Nothing much. Something funny struck me, that's all. But you were
always deficient in a sense of the ridiculous, Hermia, so it's not worth
repeating. You wouldn't see it. By-the-way, when I was lying ill, a
squad of Matabele came around, under that swab Muntusi, and looted a
little, and assegai-ed the two piccaninnies."

"What? Tickey and Primrose? Oh, poor little beasts!"

"I couldn't move a finger, of course--weak as a cat. In fact, I didn't
know what had happened till afterwards."

Again the humour of the situation struck him irresistibly. The
matter-of-course way in which she was asking and receiving the news just
as though they had parted quite in ordinary fashion and merely
temporarily, was funny. But it was Hermia all over.

"I'd become sick of it by that time," he went on. "So I sold out
everything, and came down country."

"To think of your being at the Bayfields' all this while, Hilary. And
you didn't know I was here?"

"Hadn't the ghost of a notion. Of course I had heard you were here, but
there was nothing to lead me to locate you as `Mrs Fenham.' By the
way, Hermia, what on earth made you strike out in the line of instructor
of youth? No. It's really too funny."

"Isn't it?" she said ingenuo