“ She did not see the grimness of his countenance nor mark his eye upon her; she was thinking in soreness of heart of six rosewood chairs, upholstered in velvet, a rosewood table, a sofa, and the rest of it—the profit of her marriage, her sheet-anchor and her prop. She felt as though she had given her life for them.
Christian rode away with his back to the sun, with no word spoken between them, and as his pony broke into a lope—the Boer half-trot, half-canter,—he caught and subdued an impulse to look back at the house. ”

“ Jakes' affairs returned to her, and brought with it the figure of Kamis, mute, inglorious, with his London diploma, wasting his skill and knowledge literally on the desert air. While Mrs. Jakes, quite involuntarily, recalled the flavor of the music-master of years ago, who played of nights a violin in the orchestra of the Putney Hippodrome and carried a Bohemian glamour about him on his daily rounds, Margaret's mind was astray in the paths of the Karoo where wandered under the stars, unaccountable and heartrending, a healer clothed with the flesh and skin of tragedy. ”

“ Bailey from the eye of Heaven traveled at a thoughtful pace along the path to the farmhouse, cocked at a confident angle upon a head in which faith in the world was re-established. Boy Bailey had no doubt that the money would be forthcoming. What he had heard of the conversation between Margaret and Kamis had assured him of the Kafir's resources and he felt himself already as solvent as if the minted money were heavy in his pockets. A pleasant sense of security possessed his versatile spirit, the sense that to-morrow may be counted upon. For such as Mr. Bailey, every day has its price. ”

“ At the farm, a mile away, figures moved about and among the kraals, wonderfully and delicately clear in that diamond air which stirred her blood like wine. She could even make out Paul; the distance robbed him of nothing of his deliberate, dreamy character as he went to and fro with his air of one concerned with greater things than the mere immediacies of every day. There was always a suggestion about him of one who stoops from cloudy altitudes of preoccupation to the little concerns of men, and towards Margaret he wore the manner of having a secret to divulge which was difficult to name. ”

“ Margaret detected the hand of Kamis in this precaution. She said nothing, but stooped with Mrs. Jakes to try to rouse the doctor. The sickening reek of the man's breath affronted her as she bent over him.
Mrs. Jakes shook him and called on him by name in a loud half-whisper, lowering her face close to his ear. She was persuasive, remonstrant; she had the manner of reasoning briskly with him and rousing him to better ways.
"Eustace, Eustace," she called, hushing her tones as though the night and the desert were perilous with ears. "Come, Eustace; you can get up if you try. ”

“ Samson had stared while Ford laughed silently but visibly. Mrs. Jakes had not understood the implication of it; she was only aware, reddening and resentful, that Margaret had scored in some subtle fashion.
The hatred of Mrs. Jakes was a cue to consistency of action no less plain than her love. "I like people to know their own minds," was one of her self-revelations, and she believed that worthy people, decent people, good people were those who saw their way clear under all circumstances of friendship and hostility and were prepared to strike and maintain a due attitude upon any encounter. ”

“ She smiled graciously at Paul, who was watching her, and took her seat, resigned to martyrdom.
Christian du Preez gave the girl a slack hand and murmured incoherently some salutation, while his gaze took in avidly each feature of her and summed up her effect of easy modernity. He recognized in her a certain feminine quality for which he had no name. Once before he had glimpsed it as in a revelation, when, as a youth newly returned from service on commando against rebellious Kafirs, he had spent an evening in a small town and there seen a performance by a traveling theatrical company. ”

“ Margaret frowned and then laughed.
"What an absurd business," she cried. "Supposing he had told and there had been a row—it would have been better than this everlasting stagnation. It would have been more like life."
The Kafir sighed. "Not life," he answered gently. "Not your life. It meant a death in life—like mine."
His embarrassed and mournful look passed beyond her to the Karoo, spreading its desolation to the skies as a blind man might lift his eyes in prayer. ”

“ He shook his head at them.
"Dam walls have got dam ears," he observed. "You naughty things, you."
Margaret turned helplessly to Kamis for light.
"What is it?" she asked.
He had jumped to his feet and away from her at the first sound, and now turned a slow eye upon her. The negro countenance is the home of crude emotions; the untempered extremes have been its sculptors through the ages. Its mirth is a guffaw, its sorrow is a howl, its wrath is the naked spirit of murder. He looked at her now with a face alight and transfigured with slaughterous intention.
"Go away," he said, in a whisper. ”

“ Jakes tracked that lantern to its hiding-place. Margaret slowly descended the steps from the stoep and sat down on the lowest of them to look at the night. There was a touch of chill in it, and she gathered herself up closely, with her hands clasped around her knees. The wide sleeves of the dressing-gown fell back and left her arms bare to the elbow and the recurring wind, like a cold breath, touched her on the chest where the loose robe parted. The immensity of the night, veiling with emptiness unimaginable bare miles, awed her like a great presence ”

“ Samson. It was only when Mrs. Jakes came to the breakfast-room door and set the gong booming melodiously, that he relaxed and came back to a mild interest in the immediate earth, as though the gong were a permission to stand at ease and dismiss. He halted by the steps to wipe his monocle in his white abundant handkerchief, and surveyed, perfunctorily at first and then with a narrowing interest, the great extent of brown and gray-green that stretched away from the foot of the steps to a silvery and indeterminate distance. ”

“ Ford was at the end of his wits. While he pitied Mrs. Jakes, Margaret might be dying in her room, under the bland and interested eyes of Fat Mary. He turned swiftly to the Kafir.
"Could you prescribe if I told you what she looked like?" he asked, in a half-whisper. "Could you do anything in that way?"
"Perhaps." The Kafir was quick to understand. Even in the urgency of the time, Ford was thankful that he had to deal with a man who understood readily and replied at once, a man like himself.
"Let me pass, Mrs. Jakes," he said, and made for the stairs. ”

“ Fat Mary forgot her indignation in her curiosity, and came tiptoeing across the floor, holding a candle to light him, and stood at his shoulder to watch. Her big ridiculous face was gleeful as he took up the syringe; she knew a joke when she saw one.
Ford pinched the white skin with thumb and forefinger as he had been bidden and touched it with the point of the needle. The point slipped and was reluctant to enter; he had to take hold firmly and thrust it, like a man sewing leather. The girl's hand twitched slightly and fell open again and was passive. ”

“ The clay which he had been shaping was another head, and now he kneaded it out of shape between his hands and rounded it rudely for a sketch of the face before him. The Kafir, Kamis, had bidden him refrain from his attempts to do mass and detail at once, to form the features and the expression together; but Paul knew he had little time before him and meant to make the most of it. The tramp had his hands joined behind his head and his eyes half-closed; he offered to the boy the spectacle of a man beaten to the very ground and content to take his ease there. ”

“ Jakes and then the doctor joined the spectators on the stoep as the party drew out of the distance and defined itself as a string of Kafirs on foot, herded upon their way by five Cape Mounted Police with a tall young officer riding in the rear. It was a monstrous phenomenon to emerge thus from the vagueness and mystery of the haze, and Margaret uttered a sharp exclamation of distress as it came close and showed itself in all its miserable detail. There were perhaps twenty Kafirs, men and women both, dusty, lean creatures with the eyes, at once timorous and untameable, of wild animals. ”

“ It needed a Boer, with his feet in the mud and his head among the stars, to clothe her with dignity as with a robe and add to her valuation of herself the riches of his woman-haunted imagination. She passed from sight again, and for the time he scarcely regretted her, for she left glamour behind her and a vision of womanhood equipped, debonnaire, heart-breaking in its fragility and its daring.
The outcome of that revelation was marriage within the week; but it never revisited the bored and weary woman whom Christian du Preez had brought home to his farm and its solitudes. ”

“ Even her anxiety to sell Ford and Mr. Samson along with the house did not cause her to deflect for an instant from the course of speech and action she had selected. There were yet Penfolds in Putney and Clapham Junction, and when the sale was completed she would see them again and rejoin their congenial circle; but her joy at the prospect was private, her final and transcendent secret.
Nothing is more natural to man than to pose; by a posture, he can correct the crookedness of his nature and be for himself, and sometimes for others too, the thing he would be. ”

“ It was a world at gaze, brooding grimly. The little morning wind, which would die when the sun rose clear of the horizon and leave the veld to its day-long torpor of heat, leaned upon their faces; the girl raised her brows against it and breathed deeply of its buoyancy.
"Oh," she said; "this is what I came for."
"The air?" Paul glanced sideways at her clear profile set against the shadowy morning. "They say it is good for—for—"
He hesitated; Mrs. Jakes had managed to make the word difficult. But Miss Harding took it in her stride.
"For the lungs?" she suggested without compunction. ”

“ The afternoon was stored with the day's accumulated heat and the cool of the grass beneath and the freshness of the water, out of sight beyond the wall but diffusing itself like an odor in the air, combined to contrast the spot in which they talked with the dazed sun-beaten land about them and gave to both a sense of privacy and isolation. The Kafir's words stirred a fresh curiosity in Margaret.
"He thinks you are making the natives dangerous," she said. ”

“ As it happened, Paul had heard of the Surgeon of the Fleet who first carried dominion to the shadow of Table Mountain.
"Well," said the Kafir, "you can imagine Jan van Riebeek, shaped in bronze, standing on a high pedestal at the foot of a great street, with the water of the bay behind him, where his ships used to float, and his strong Dutch face lifted to look up to Table Mountain, as it was when he landed? Don't think of the bronze shape; think of the man. That's what clay is for—to make things like that!" ”

“ Jakes had fallen in the road. Mrs. Jakes must have told him, and her protests had been uneasy lies. Margaret carefully avoided looking at her; in this hour, all were to receive mercy save herself.
Van Zyl went on, rasping at her in tones quite unlike the thickish staccato voice which he kept for his unofficial moments. That voice she would never hear again; impossible for her ever to regain the status of a person in whom the police have no concern. ”

“ Then the aloe plumes plucked at her thoughts, and the haze closed about her again, leaving her blind in a deep and aimless preoccupation in which her thoughts were no more than a pulse, repeating itself to no end. Ford's declaration and his manner of making it; the Punchinello countenance of the trooper, bestially insinuating; Mrs. Jakes eating soup at Mr. Samson;—these came and went in the dreadful arena of her mind and made a changing spectacle that baffled the march of the clock-hands. ”

“ Poor Mrs. Jakes! Seven thousand miles from the streets of Clapham Junction, an exile from the cheeriness and security of its little decent houses, she held yet with a frail hand to the skirts of its beatitude. In the drawer in her bedroom which also contained Jakes' dress suit, she kept in tissue paper and sincere regard a morocco-bound mausoleum of memory—an album. Only two or three times in Mr. Samson's experience—and he had been an inmate of the Sanatorium for four years—had she brought it forth. ”

“ The three who sat daily at meat with her knew and told each other that her composure, her face keyed up like an instrument to its pitch of vacant propriety, were a mask. Sometimes, even, there had been sounds in the night to assure them of it; occasionally Jakes, on his way to bed in the small hours, would slip on the stairs and bump down a dozen or so of them, and lie where he fell till he was picked up and set on his way again; there would be the rasp of labored breath as he was supported along the corridor, and the mumble of his blurred speech hushed by prayerful whispers. ”

“ The policeman smacked his boot with his whip.
"Nor yet me with you," he said. "So if you want to stare, go and stare at something else. See?"
Paul backed away, angry and shy, and moved down the platform to be out of the sound of their voices. The things that people laughed at were seldom clear to him; it seemed that he had been left out of some understanding to take certain things as funny and laugh at them. His mother's mirth, breaking startlingly out of unexpected incidents, out of words spoken without afterthought, out of little accidents and breakages, always puzzled him. ”

“ Van Zyl had high hopes of laying his hands on the mysterious Kafir who had committed the crime of being incomprehensible to nervous kraals, whose occupants had a way of shaking off wonder and alarm by taking exercise with their weapons among the cattle of their neighbors. The Sanatorium, under his orders, was being watched for any indications of messages passing between Margaret and the Kafir, and the dusty, armed men came and went continually, a succession of drilled shoulders, tanned, unconcerned faces, and expressionless eyes puckered against the sun's stare. ”

“ Boy Bailey gasped and flung back his foot for the swinging kick that would save him from the noise of her complainings.
He kicked, blind to all but the woman on the ground, alone with her in a narrow theater of bestial purpose and sweating terrors. He neither heard nor saw the quick spring of the waiting Kafir, who charged him with a shoulder, football fashion, while the kick still traveled in the air and pitched him aside to fall brutally on his ear and elbow. ”