the war"--some of his Zulu war experiences being among the
"ripping good yarns" he had the reputation for spinning.

"Oh, no they won't. Besides, you don't suppose they know who fought
against them or who didn't--and even if they did they'd only respect me
the more for it."

"There's a little matter I want to talk over with you, Le Sage," said
Warren, as they got up from table, "if it isn't trenching on your
Sabbath rest."

"Oh, Sabbath rest be hanged," answered Le Sage, shortly. "Come along."

"Father, don't talk in that abominably heathenish way," laughed Lalante.
"Before your children too!"

She and Wyvern, both, and again, appreciated Warren's tact, for neither
of them believed in the pretext. They had not been alone together yet,
and Warren, like the good fellow he was, had resolved that they should
be. That was how they read it.

So while the other two adjourned to Le Sage's business den, these two
adjourned to the _stoep_. The small boys, like their kind, unable to
keep still for any length of time, betook themselves off somewhere down
in the garden.

"Love, and so you are really going," began Lalante with her hand in his.

"Really. But it is going only to return."

"Yes, I feel that. Yet--it is like parting with one's very life."

"That is how I feel it. And yet--and yet--this time somehow I am
sanguine. I have a sort of instinct that things are going to mend; that
one's luck cannot always be on the down grade. I can't tell why, but
something--a sort of revelation, perhaps--has come to me telling me I am
doing right in going away from here--wrench though it will be. But mere
locality--why that's nothing as long as we have each other. Is it?"

"Darling, you know it is not," she answered, her head resting in the
hollow of his shoulder. "If it were a mere rock island in the middle of
the sea and I had you, it would be Paradise."

He laughed sadly. But it was no time for upsetting her ideals. For a
few moments they sat in a happy, if somewhat sad, silence; the same hum
of winged insects making its droning lull upon the sunlit air; the
sweeping roll of golden green spread out in radiant vista beneath the
unclouded sky; the full, seductive beauty of the girl nestling within
his arms.

"I was longing for you so," she said at last. "I was sitting here all
the morning going over all the time since we had first known each other.
I felt that I would give half my life if you would only come o