Poppy

THE girl, with a little curling motion, leaned back in the rickshaw and gazed with fascinated eyes at the moving picture before her, seen through the hazy heat of a summer day.

Above the wide main street of Durban the sun blazed and glared like a brazen image of itself in the high ardent blue. Men in loose white ducks and flannels sauntered along, or stood smoking and talking under the shop awnings.

Carriages and rickshaws flew past, containing women in light gowns and big veils, with white and sometimes scarlet sunshades. Black boys at the street corners held out long-stalked roses and sprays of fragrant mimosa to the passers-by, beguiling them to buy. Coolies with baskets of fish on their heads and bunches of bananas across their shoulders, shambled along, white-clad and thin-legged. One, with a basket of freshly-caught fish on his arm, cried in a nasal sing-song voice:

"Nice lovely shad! Nice lovely shad!"

Two water-carts, clanking along in opposite directions, left a dark track behind them on the dusty road, sending up a heavy odour of wet earth which the girl snuffed up as though she had some transportingly sweet perfume at her delicate nostrils.

"I'm sure there is no smell in the world like the smell of wet Africa," she cried softly to herself, laughing a little. Her eyes took on a misty look that made them like lilac with the dew on it.

Her black hair, which branched out on either side of her forehead, had a trick of spraying little veils of itself over her eyes and almost touching her cheek-bones, which were pitched high in her face, giving it an extraordinarily subtle look.

She was amazingly attractive in a glowing ardent fashion that paled the other women in the street and made men step to the edge of the pavement to stare at her.

She looked at them, too, through the spraying veils of her hair, but her face remained perfectly composed under the swathes of white chiffon which she wore flung back over her wide hat, brought down at the sides and twisted round her throat, with two long flying ends.

The big Zulu boy between the shafts, running noiselessly except for the pat of his bare feet and the "Tch-k, tch-k, tch-k" of the seed bangles round his ankles, became conscious that his fare was creating interest. He began to put on airs, giving little shouts of glorification, taking leaps in the air and tilting the shafts of the rickshaw backwards to the discomfort of its occupant.

She leaned forward, and in a low voice spoke a few edged words in Zulu that made him change his manners and give a glance of astonishment behind him, crying:

"Aa-h! Yeh-boo Inkosizaan!" behaving himself thereafter with decorum, for it was a disconcerting thing that an Inkosizaan who had come straight off the mail-steamer at the Point should speak words of reproof to him in his own language.

Presently he came to the foot of the Berea Hill, which is long and sloping, causing him to slacken pace and draw deep breaths.

A tram-car dashed past them going down-hill, while another climbed laboriously up, both open to the breeze and full of people. The road began to be edged with fenced and hedged-in gardens, the houses standing afar and almost hidden by shrubs and greenery.

The girl spoke to the rickshaw-puller once more.

"The Inkos at the Point told you where to go. Do you know the house?"

He answered yes, but that it was still afar off-right at the top of the Berea.

She leaned back again content. It delighted her to be alone like this. It was quite an adventure, and an unexpected one. A malicious, mischievous smile flashed across her face as she sat thinking of the annoyance of the Inkos left behind at the docks. He had been furious when he found no closed carriage waiting for them.

There was one on the quay, but it was not theirs, and on approaching it and finding out his mistake, he stood stammering with anger. But she had flashed into a waiting rickshaw, knowing very well that he could not force her to get out and go back to the ship without making a scene.

Nothing would induce him to make a scene and attract the attention of people to himself. He had indeed told her in a low voice to get out and come back with him to wait for a carriage, but she merely made a mouth and looked appealingly at him, saying:

"Oh Luce! It will be so lovely in a rickshaw. I have never ridden in one like this yet."

"Well, ride to the devil," he had amiably responded, and turned his back on her. She had called out after him, in an entrancingly sweet voice:

"Yes, I know, Luce; but what is the address?"

"It was a shame," she said to herself now, still smiling; "but really I don't often vex him!"

A man and a woman passed, as she sat smiling her subtle smile through her spraying hair, and looked at her with great curiosity.

Afterwards the man said excitedly:

"That girl takes the shine out of Mary--"

The woman, who looked well-bred with a casual distinguished manner, agreed with him, but did not tell him so. She said:

"Her eyes look as though they were painted in by Burne-Jones, and she is dressed like a Beardsley poster; but I think she is only a girl who is glad to be alive. Mary, however, is the most beautiful woman in Africa."

The girl heard the words "Burne-Jones eyes," and knew they were speaking of her.

At last she arrived at the gates of her destination. Big, green iron gates, that clanged behind her as she walked quickly forward down a winding path into a deep dim garden. There was no more to be seen but trees and tangles of flowering shrubs and bushes and stretches of green grass, and trees and trees and trees. Some of the trees were so tall and old that they must have been growing there when Vasco da Gama first found Natal; but there were mangoes and sweetly-smelling orange arbours, that could only have been planted a mere twenty or thirty years. The magnolia bushes were in bud, and clots of red and golden flowers were all aflare. Cacti, spreading wide prickly arms, and tall furzy grasses. Cool wet corners had grottos frondy with ferns; other corners were like small tropical jungles with enormous palms trailed and tangled over with heavy waxen-leaved creepers and strangely shaped flowers.

At last, deep in the heart of this wild, still garden, she found the house. A tall rose-walled house, its balconies and verandahs, too, all draped and veiled with clinging green. One lovely creeper that clothed the hall-porch was alive with flowers that were like scarlet stars.

She broke one of them off and stuck it in the bosom of her gown, where it glowed and burned all day.

Then she rang the bell.

After a minute, someone came bustling down the hall and the door opened, discovering a stout and elderly coloured woman in a tight dress of navy-blue sateen with large white spots. Upon her head she wore a snowy dook. At the sight of the girl she shrieked, and fell back into a carved oak chair that stood conveniently at hand.

"Poppy!" she cried; "and no carriage sent for Luce! What time did the steamer come, in the name of goodness me?"

"It's no use asking that question now, Kykie," said the girl grimly. "The only thing to do is to send a carriage down at once."

Kykie departed with amazing alacrity, while the girl examined the hall, and opening the doors that gave off it, peeped into several rooms.

"Most of the old furniture from the farm!" she commented with a look of pleasure. Presently she came to a flight of three stairs, and directed by the sound of Kykie's voice, she stepped down them and found herself in a large white-washed kitchen lined with spotless deal tables and broad shelves. An enormous kitchen range, shining and gleaming with steel and brass, took up the whole of one side of the kitchen. Wide windows let in a flood of cheerful sunshine.

Kykie, having loaded three Zulu boys with imprecations and instructions and driven them forth, had sunk into a chair again, panting, with her hand pressed to her heart, and an expression of utter misery on her face.

"Don't be so excited, Kykie," said the girl. "You can't escape the wrath to come; what is the use of making yourself miserable about it beforehand?"

Kykie rolled her big eyes heavenwards; the whites of them were a golden yellow.

"His first day home!" she wailed. "They told me at the shipping office the steamer wouldn't be in before three. May their mothers--"

Poppy walked round the kitchen, looking at everything.

"You've got all the same nice old copper things you had at the farm, haven't you, Kykie? But it is a much bigger kitchen. Which table will you let me have to mix the salads on?"

Kykie's face became ornamented with scowls.

"My salads are as good as anyone's," she asserted.

"Nonsense! you know Luce always likes mine best. Come upstairs now and show me my room."

"Me? With the lunch to get ready!" screamed Kykie, and jumping up she ran to the stove and began to rattle the pots.

"Well, I will find it myself," said Poppy, going towards the door, "and I think you're very unkind on my first day home."

But Kykie gave no heed. As a rule she was of a sociable turn of mind and under other circumstances would have hung about Poppy, showing her everything and bombarding her with questions; but now she was in the clutches of despair and dismay at the thought of her neglect of her adored master, Luce Abinger, and her very real fear of the storm that would surely break over her head when he arrived.

Kykie called herself a "coloured St. Helena lady," but by the fat gnarled shape of her, it is likely that she was more than half a Hottentot. Also the evidence of her hair was against her: it was crisp and woolly, instead of being lank and oily as a proper "St. Helena lady's" should be. However, she always kept it concealed beneath a spotless dook. Her real name, as she often informed Poppy in aggrieved accents, was Celia Frances Elizabeth of Teck Fortune; but Luce Abinger had brutally named her Kykie, and that was all she was ever called in his house. By way of retaliation it was her agreeable custom to address her master and Poppy Destin by their Christian names; but Luce Abinger only laughed, and Poppy didn't mind in the least. The old woman was quite ignorant and uneducated, but she had lived all her life as a servant amongst civilised people, and she spoke correct and fluent English, tacking many curious expressions of her own to the tails of her remarks with an air of intense refinement.

She was often crabbed of temper and cantankerous of tongue, but the heart within her wide and voluptuous bosom was big for Luce Abinger and all that pertained to him. She had served him during the whole of his twenty-five years of life in South Africa; and she was a very pearl of a cook.

Poppy found her room without any difficulty. On opening the first door on the first landing and looking in, she recognised her books, and the faded yellow silk counterpane with the border of red poppies worked by Kykie in past days. She took off her hat and surveyed the room with contentment. Her cushions were in her chairs; her books in their accustomed book-shelves; her long mirror with the slim gilt frame hung between two windows that gave upon the balcony; her writing-table stood opposite the mirror where she could look up and see herself as she wrote. Her brown print of Monna Lisa was above her dressing-table, and her silver cross with the ivory Christ nailed to it hung over her head-

"To keep a maid from harm!"

There were no pictures on the pale gold walls: only three wonderful drawings of herself, done in grey and blue and scarlet chalk on sheets of rough-edged common brown paper and fastened up by drawing-pins. These were the work of Luce Abinger.

She observed that all the bowls and vases were filled with green leaves-no flowers. Kykie and the boys knew that green leaves were dearer to her than flowers.

Presently she rose and went to the mirror on the wall. Her hair did not quite please her, so she took out two little gold side-combs and ran them through it, until it branched out characteristically once more. She performed this ceremony on an average of twenty times a day, and always with a look of the frankest pleasure at the sight of herself.

"How nice my hair is!" she thought, "and how glad I am that it branches out in that fascinating way that just suits my face! If it were any other kind of hair, sleek, or smooth, or curly, I should not look nearly so charming."

Later she stepped into the balcony. The sun still glared, but the place was full of dim coolness, for its roof was massed with clematis and Virginia creeper, and heavy curtains of creeper hung from roof to rail; but long openings had been cut in the greenery to afford a view of the town and sea. Over the tops of the trees, far away below, beyond many white houses and gardens and a shining beach, was the Indian Ocean. It lay very still and splendid: a vast sheet of Sèvres enamel with a trivial frill of white at its edges, like the lace froth at the bottom of a woman's ball-gown. When storms sweep the Natal coast, that still shining sea can boom and roar and flash like a thousand cannons bombarding the town; but on the day that Poppy Destin first looked at it from her balcony, it was as still and flat as a sea on a map.

Long, long thoughts were hers as she stood gazing there; and the best of them all was that she was back once more in the land where the roots of her heart were planted deep.

While she stood lost in her reveries, Luce Abinger passed through the garden below, walking noiselessly across the green lawns. He saw her dreaming there, in her white gown with the scarlet flower flaming at her breast, and his tormented face became even less lovely. At that time his mood resembled the mood of Job when he desired to curse God and die.

Poppy, becoming hungry, went down to look for lunch. She found the master of the house already seated, beating and jangling his forks together, a habit of his when he was impatient. He never touched his knives. Poppy had come to the conclusion that, like James I, he had some reason to hate and fear naked blades.

"The g-gong has been sounded twice for you," he began agreeably. "Were you afraid the view wouldn't be there after lunch?"

"I beg your pardon, Luce. I didn't know you were in, and I never heard a sound of the gong. Kykie, you should beat it louder."

Kykie was at the sideboard decanting whiskey. She resembled a person who had recently taken part in a dynamitic explosion. Her dook was pushed to the back of her head, her eyes stuck out, and perspiration beaded her nose and cheek-bones. Several of the buttons of her tight dress had come undone.

"Heavenly me!" she retorted in shrill staccato, "you never hear anything you don't want to, Poppy." With that she banged the decanter down and floundered from the room.

"What can be the matter with Kykie!" said Poppy in a wondering voice. What she was really wondering was, whether the fireworks had all been exhausted on Kykie's devoted head or whether there would be a detonation in her own direction shortly.

Babiyaan, a boy who had been in Luce Abinger's service for ten years, waited upon them with deft, swift hands. Poppy gave an inquiring glance at him; but though he had also received a generous share of obloquy and vilification, his face was as serene and impassive as an Egyptian's.

Some delicious fish was served, grilled as only Kykie could grill, followed by cutlets and green peas, and a salad of sliced Avocado pears, delicately peppered, and with a ravishing dressing.

Luce Abinger always preferred Poppy to mix the salads. He said that she combined all the qualifications demanded by the old Spanish receipt for the maker of a good salad-a spendthrift for the oil, a miser for the vinegar, a counsellor for the salt, and a lunatic to stir all up. It appeared that she sometimes fell short in the matter of salt, but she assured him that he had a fine stock of that within himself to fall back on, and acids too, in case of a lack of vinegar.

Kykie's salad was very good, and Poppy told Babiyaan to tell her so. Later, she also sent a message of praise concerning the omelette au Kirsch. Except for these remarks the meal was partaken of in silence. Poppy, while she ate, observed and approved the old-rose walls, the few beautiful mellowy pictures upon them, the dark polished floor and the Persian praying-rugs spread sleekly down the room. She looked everywhere but at the face of Luce Abinger, for she knew that his devils were at him; and as the possessor of devils of her own, she both felt compassion and exhibited courtesy in the presence of other people's. She never looked at Luce Abinger's face at any time if she could help it, for the sight of unbeautiful things always gave her intense pain; and his face had the added terror and sadness of a thing that has once been beautiful. Its right side was still strong and fine in line; and it was easy to see that the mouth, before it was dragged out of drawing by the scar and embittered and distorted by its frightful sneer, must have been wonderfully alluring. The scar had left his eyes untouched, except for a slight pulling-down of the outer corner of the left one where the disfigurement began. They must have been strikingly beautiful blue eyes once, but now a sort of perpetual cold fury at the back of them gave them an odd and startling light. Apart from that, they were eyes which it was not good for women to search in. Poppy sometimes thought of them as dark and sinister pools from which it was best to retreat, for fear of drowning and strangling in strange waters.

Presently Babiyaan brought in the little silver urn and placed it before Poppy, and she lighted the spirit-lamp under it and made the coffee as she was always used to do in the old white farm. Cigars and cigarettes were put before Abinger.

Abinger drank his coffee as he had eaten, in absolute silence. Then, getting up suddenly, he bit off a word of apology with the end of his cigar, and left the room, Babiyaan following him.

Poppy immediately helped herself to a cigarette, put her elbows on the table and began to smoke. Later, she took her coffee and sat in the verandah. It was shady and full of deep comfortable chairs. From thence she presently saw Abinger emerge from the front door and depart into the garden; the closing clang of the gate told her that he had gone out. The heat of the day was oppressive. She lay back, staring at the lacy green of the trees against the blue, and considering the horrible affair of Luce Abinger's devils.

"It is bad enough for me to have to live with them-what must it be for him!" was her thought. She had seen his torment coming upon him as they neared Africa. Day by day he had grown more saturnine and unsociable. At last he spoke to no one; only Poppy, as a privileged person had an occasional snarl thrown in her direction. It was plain to her that returning to Africa meant to him returning to purgatory; especially since he did not intend to go back to seclusion, but to take up his residence in this house in Durban, where he had often lived in past years. Poppy had gathered from Kykie that before he "got his mark," as she curiously expressed it, and went to live at the old white farm, Abinger had kept house in Johannesburg and Durban; had lived for a part of the year in each house, and was well known in both places. So that coming back would cause him all the torture of meeting old friends who had known him before his disfigurement. He would have to run the gauntlet of familiar eyes grown curious and questioning.

"Why should he have chosen to come back at all to the place of his torment?" Poppy wondered. "It would surely have been simpler and easier to have settled in Italy or somewhere where he knew no one, and would not be noticed so much. It can only be that Africa has her talons in his heart, too; she has clawed him back to her brown old bosom-he had to come."

As Poppy sat in the verandah thinking of these things, she heard the boys in the room behind her clearing the luncheon-table, and talking to each other in their own language. Either they had forgotten her or they thought she could not hear.

"Where has Shlalaimbona gone?" asked Umzibu; and Babiyaan answered without hesitation:

"He has gone to the Ker-lub to make a meeting with Intandugaza and Umkoomata."

Few things are more amazing than your Kaffir servants' intimate knowledge of your affairs, except it be their absolute loyalty and secrecy in these matters outside your own walls. Abroad from home their eyes and ears and tongue know nothing. They are as stocks and stones. They might be fishes for all the information they can give concerning you and yours.

Also, whether they love or hate or are indifferent to him they serve, they will infallibly supply him with a native name that will fit him like his own skin. Sometimes the name is a mere mentioning of a physical characteristic but usually it is a thing more subtle-some peculiarity of manner or expression, some idiosyncrasy of speech-a man's secret sin has been known to be blazoned forth in one terse Zulu word.

It must not be supposed, however, that South African natives are as deep in mysterious lore as the Chinese, or as subtle as Egyptians. The fact is merely, that like all uncivilised peoples they have a fine set of instincts; an intuition leads them to nearly the same conclusions about people as would a trained reasoning power. Only that the native conclusion has a corner of the alluring misty veil of romance thrown over it, while the trained reason might only supply a cold, hard, and perhaps uninteresting fact.

Instances are, where the meaning of a native nickname is too subtle for the nominee himself-though any Zulu who runs may read and understand. If Luce Abinger had asked his servants why they called him Shlalaimbona, they would have shrugged shoulders and hung their heads, with a gentle, deprecating gesture. Being questioned, they would look blank; being told to get out and go to the devil, they would look modest. Afterwards they would exchange swift dark glances, and smiling, repeat among themselves with a gesture of stabbing: "Shlalaimbona!" Literally this word means-stab when you see him. What they meant by applying this name to Abinger, God and themselves knew best. Poppy had often pondered the reason, but she had never made any inquiries for fear it might have something to do with Abinger's scar. For another thing, Abinger desired her never to talk to the boys.

"Keep them at a distance: they will be all the better servants," was his command; and in this, as in most things, Poppy found it wiser to obey him.

Babiyaan continued to give interesting information to Umzibu.

"Just as Shlalaimbona was going to get into the carriage, Umkoomata came to the docks and fell upon him with great friendliness. Afterwards they went to an hotel to drink. Then Umkoomata made a plan for meeting at the Ker-luk when Intandugaza would be there and others-Baas Brookifield, he with the curled hair and the white teeth; and that other one, Caperone, whose wife is like a star with light around it; and Port-tal, who is always gay with an angry face."

At this juncture Umzibu missed Poppy's coffee-cup, and coming into the verandah to seek it, the presence of Poppy was revealed to him. He immediately communicated the fact by sign to Babiyaan, and a silence fell. Thereafter no more confidences; Poppy was left to speculate upon the identity of the person who wore so fascinating a title as Intandugaza, which name she translated to herself as Beloved of women. The word Umkoomata, too, had a charm of its own.

"That means someone who is very reliable, literally Sturdy One. I should like to know that man," she thought.

At about this time it occurred to her that she was tired and would go to rest in her room a while. She had risen at five that morning to watch the African coast and revel in the thought that she would soon have her foot on her own land again. The excitement of the day had tired her more than she knew. When she looked in her glass to rake the little gold combs through her hair, she saw that she was pale. The only colour about her was her scarlet ardent mouth and the flower at her breast.

She flung off her gown and plunged her arms and face into cold water, then let down her hair with a rush and pulling her chair opposite her mirror, she sat down in company she had never so far found uninteresting-the company of her own reflection.

She did not put on a wrapper. For one thing the day was warm, for another she found great pleasure in seeing her bare pale arms and shoulders, and the tall pale throat above them, so slim and young. Indeed, there are few more beautiful things in the world than a young throat-be it girl's or boy's, bird's or beast's.

The scarlet flower she had plucked at the door she wore now between her breasts. She looked at the girl in the glass a long, long time, and the girl looked back at her. But it was not the look of the woman who counts and examines her weapons, for Poppy Destin was heart-whole; she had never yet looked into her glass to see how she was reflected in some man's eyes. Always she looked to wonder. The transformation of herself from what she had been only six years ago to what she was now at eighteen, never ceased to fascinate and amaze her. When she thought of the tormented, tragic features she had feared to catch a glimpse of, and looked now into that narrow scarlet-lipped, lilac-eyed subtle face, crowned with fronds of black, black hair, she believed she must be witnessing a miracle. When she remembered her aching, thin, childish body, beaten, emaciated, lank, and beheld herself now, long-limbed, apple-breasted, with the slim strong grace and beauty of a Greek boy, she could have shouted for joy and amazement at the wonder of it all.

Yet in the old white farmhouse where she had found refuge and a remarkable education, she had been able to watch with her own eyes the change of the famished, wretched little two-leaved seedling into a beautiful flowering plant.

She had often thought of herself as one set alone in an arid waste to travel where and how she could, with no help from anyone, and who, in her terrible travelling had found hidden gifts by the wayside, and little pools of consolation to lave her wounds and her weary heart, little patches of flowers to refresh her senses-all left there for her by the loving forethought of those who had travelled that way before her; her beauty, her voice, the grace of her body, her clear understanding, grace of tongue, had come upon her as she travelled to womanhood-all so unexpectedly; all wonderful gifts hidden deeply away until she came suddenly upon them, one by one.

At last, through long thinking and piecing together of many broken ends of memory and disjointed scraps of information concerning her family history, she had come very close to realising the truth-that she owed much of what she was to the sweet simple Irish-women who had been her maternal ancestors. If your grandmother has worn a shawl over her head and walked barefoot on the bitter coast of Clare with a smile on her lips and a melody in her heart, she had something better to bequeath to you than money or possessions: her song and her smile will come down through the years and make magic in your eyes; her spirit will trample your troubles underfoot. If your mother has laid her heart in a man's hands, and her neck under a man's feet, and died for want of his kisses on her mouth, she, too, will have had something to bequeath: a cheek curved for caresses, lips amorously shaped, and sweet warm blood in the veins.

And there was more that Poppy Destin did not know. She was only eighteen and could not know all her gifts yet-some women never know them at all until they are too old to use them! She had unwittingly left uncounted her biggest asset, though it was signed and sealed upon her face-the sign and seal of Ireland. Ireland was in the frank, sweet eyes of her; in the cheek-bones pitched high in her face; in her branching black hair; in her soft sad voice, and her subtly curved lips. Though she had never seen that sad, lovely land, she was one of its fair daughters: there lay her beauty; that was her magic.

Presently she left her glass and going to the load of trunks which had been piled up inside the door, she took her dressing-case from the summit of the pile, and unlocking it, extracted a little white vellum-covered note-book. Sitting down before her writing-table she opened the book at random and kissed its pages with a rush of tears and a passion that always surged in her when she touched it. For it contained the story of her childhood, sung in little broken, wretched songs. Her blurred eyes looked from one heading to another:

"My heart is as cold as a stone in the sea!"

"My soul is like a shrivelled leaf!"

"The woman with the crooked breast."

This was the title of old Sara's story made into a little song.

Poppy Destin dreamed of being a great writer some day; but she knew, with the sure instinct of the artist, that even if her dream came true she could never surpass these little studies in misery; these cries of wretchedness wrung from a child's heart by the cruel hands of Life.

Nothing had ever yet been able to wipe from her mind the remembrance of those days. For six years she had lived a life in which fresh events and interests were of daily occurrence; and like a blighted seedling transplanted to a warm, kind climate, she had blossomed and bloomed in mind and body. But the memory of those days that had known no gleam of hope or gladness hung like a dark veil over her youth, and still had power to drive her into torments of hatred and misery. Her soul was still a shrivelled leaf, and her heart as cold as a stone in the sea. She was very sure that this should not be so; she knew that she was incomplete. The instincts of her artist nature told her that somewhere in the world there must be someone or something that would wipe this curse of hatred from her; but she had never been able to find it, and she knew not where to seek it. Art failed her when she applied it to this wound of hers that bled inwardly. Despairingly she sometimes wondered whether it was religion she needed; but religion in the house of Luce Abinger was a door to which she found no key.

Often, abroad, she had stolen away and knelt in quiet churches, and burnt candles in simple wayside chapels, trying, praying, to throw off the heavy, weary armour that cased her in, to get light into her, to feel her heart opening, like a flower, and the dew of God falling upon it. She had searched the face of the Madonna in many lands for some symbol that would point the way to a far-off reflection in herself of

"The peace and grace of Mary's face."

She had knelt in dim cathedrals, racking her ears to catch some note in gorgeous organ strains or some word from the lips of a priest that would let loose a flood of light in her and transform her life. But always, when the ecstasy and exaltation had passed off, and the scent of incense no longer wrapped her round, she could feel again the cold of the stone and the rustle of the leaf in her breast. She could hear without annoyance the bitter fleers of Abinger at religion and priests and churches, and though they offended her taste, could listen serene-eyed. She understood very well what ailed Luce Abinger, for she was touched with the blight that lay thick upon him. His nature was warped, his vision darkened by hatred and evil memories. His soul was maimed and twisted in the same cruel fashion that his face had been scarred and seamed, and he terribly hated God. Poppy often thought of it as an ironical trick of fate, that she and Luce Abinger-just the two people in all South Africa, perhaps, who could do least for each other's peace and healing-should be thrown together to live under the same roof for many years. In some ways they had served each other well. He had made his house a refuge for her from persecution, and had been the means of educating and bringing her to fine womanhood. She, on the other hand, had come into his life at a time when he was on the verge of madness and when it meant everything to him to have some interest that would tear his thoughts from himself and his disgust of life.

The solitude of the quiet old farm, chosen for its isolated position, was lightened by the presence of the young girl. Abinger had been diverted to watch the change and development in the small, shipwrecked vagabond. Afterwards it had first amused, then interested him, to feed her eager appetite for learning. For three years he had taught her himself, in strange desultory fashion it is true, but it happened to be the fashion best suited to her needs and temperament. He imported from England huge weekly packages of books of both modern and classical literature, together with every variety of journal and magazine. He allowed Poppy the free run of all; only, always she must recount to him afterwards what she had read. A sort of discussion ensued, so dominated by his mordant cynicism and biting wit that she certainly ran no danger of developing any mawkish views of life. This for two or three hours daily. The rest of time was hers to read in or wander for hours in the lovely silent country, knowing a peace and tranquillity she had never dreamed of in her early wretched years. The part of the Transvaal they were in was but thinly populated-a few scattered Boer farms, and a native mission-house with a chapel and school instituted by a brotherhood of French priests of the Jesuit order. These were their only neighbours, and they not close ones.

Abinger had chosen his retreat well.

After three years it had occurred to him to leave the farm and go back to the world. He had tired of seclusion, and longed, even while he feared, to be amongst his fellows again. He was not yet prepared, however, to go back to the African haunts that had known him in the past, but made for the big open world beyond the seas; and Poppy went with him as his sister. Wherever they went he never allowed her to make any friends; only when they reached any city or place where he cared to stay for any length of time, he at once engaged masters and mistresses for her, to continue the education that he had by now tired of superintending, but which, for reasons of his own, he wished to perfect.

* * *

AT five o'clock Kykie appeared with a tea-tray. She had assumed an air of calm, and her afternoon dress, which afforded a fine display of roses trellised on a bright blue background, and gave her the appearance of a large and comfortable ottoman. She cast an outraged look about the room.

"Haven't you unpacked yet, for gracious' sake, Poppy?"

"No, I haven't. Bring the tea over here, Kykie."

She was lying on her bed, which was long and narrow as the path to heaven, and yet seemed to have grown too short for her, since she was obliged to perch her feet upon the brass bar across the end.

"Then what have you been doing, in the name of goodness me?"

"Nothing ... just thinking ... pour it out and come and sit by me here.... I haven't had a word with you yet."

Kykie poured out the tea, and put some little toasted cakes on a plate, using her fat, yellow hands with extraordinary delicacy. Afterwards she sat in a chair with the things in her lap, waiting until Poppy should be ready.

"What is it like here in Durban, Kykie?... How long have you been here?"

Kykie became very important, waggling her shoulders and rolling her eyeballs.

"More than six months getting this house ready for habitation ... men working in the garden day and night, for it was a wilderness and the poor old place all gone to pot, dearest me."

"It looks all right now; I should think Luce was pleased?"

"Never so much as a thank you extremingly."

"Oh well, you know his ways ... but I am sure he appreciates all you do. He has often said to me while we were away that he wished you were with us."

Kykie looked well pleased at this, but having passed the tea, she waved her hands deprecatingly.

"You're just buttering me up to heaven, Poppy!"

"No, I'm not. And he will eat again now he has you to cook for him. Abroad he used to eat frightfully little, but to-day I noticed he made an excellent lunch."

Smiles wreathed Kykie's wide and dropsical face, and every tooth in her head was revealed.

"Dearest me, now Poppy, really? Well! but then I don't suppose they know how to cook very well abroad in London, do they?"

"Not so well as you, of course," said Poppy smiling and munching toast.

Suddenly Kykie's face became dolorous.

"Did they look at his mark much, for heavenly goodness?" she inquired in a dismal whisper.

"Not so much. You know, Kykie, the world is full of all sorts of strange-looking people-especially France and Italy. In Naples, now, they didn't take the slightest notice of him."

"For goodness' sake there must be some sights there!"

"More tea. It is lovely to be home again and have you waiting on me."

"Ah! I expect you liked it best abroad in that London, now Poppy?"

"Never. I thought I should, but I had forgotten that my roots were planted out here. As soon as I got out of sight of Africa they began to pull and hurt ... you've no idea of the feeling, Kykie ... it is terrible ... and it always came upon me worst in cities. I used to be sick with longing for a glimpse of the big open spaces with nothing in view but land and sky ... for the smell of the veldt, you know, when it is baking hot and the rain comes fizzling down on it; and the early morning wind, when it has blown across a thousand miles of sun-burnt grass and little stalky, stripy, veldt-flowers and stubby bushes, and smells of the big black patches on the hill-sides where the fires have been, and of the dorn bloems on the banks of the rivers ... and the oozy, muddy, reeking, rushing rivers! Oh Kykie, when I thought of Africa, in some prim blue-and-gold continental hotel, I felt like a caged tiger-cat, raging at the bars of the cage!... In Paris and London I couldn't bear to go to the big open parks for fear the sickness would come upon me.... It was like being a wild ass of the desert, knee-haltered in a walled-in garden."

Kykie might have been an amazingly-arrayed copper idol representing Africa, so benign and gratified was her smile.

"Tell me some more, Poppy. Where else did you think of Africa?"

"Well, Palermo nearly drove me wild. It has the same hot moist air as Natal, and the flowers have the same subtle scents. The big spotted mosquitoes bit like terriers and followed us as high as we could go; but I couldn't even hate them, Kykie, they were so like the wretches we have out here-there's been one biting my instep all the afternoon." She pulled up her foot, and began to rub the spot gently through her stocking.

"I think Norway was the worst of all. The men there have beards and the same calm eyes as the Boers, and the people are all simple and kind, just as they were on the farms in the Transvaal ... and sometimes on the top of a steep still hill I could close my eyes and pretend that I was on a wild mountain krantz and the hush of the waterfalls all round one was the hush of the tall veldt grasses waving in the wind.... But when I looked, and saw only the still green waters of the fjords and afar off a glacier thrust out between two hills like the claw of some great white monster ... oh Kykie, I could have torn the heart out of my breast and thrown it into the waters below."

"Heavenly me! And were there coloured people there too?"

"Not in Norway; but America is full of them, and I hate them for cheats and frauds ... for I was always listening and waiting to hear some Kaffir or Dutch word from their lips ... and they never spoke anything but mincing, drawling American, through their noses, like this, Kykie:

"'Oh say, would you tell me what time this kyar is due to start?'

"Once I saw a boy in an elevated-railway car, who, though he was magnificently dressed in navy blue serge and wore a brimmer hat, looked so exactly like Jim Basuto who ran away from the farm, that I said to him in Kaffir:

"'You had better make haste and come back to the farm, Jim, and mind the sheep!'

"He simply stared at me, and said to another boy, who might have been a Zulu chief except for his clothes:

"'Say, this one looks to me as if she is dippy. I think she is the new star at Hammerstein's that ky-ant speak anything but French.'

"Luce was so furious, he used fearful language at the Kaffir, and made me leave the train at the next station, and wouldn't speak to me for a week."

Having finished her tea and eaten all the bread-and-butter and cakes, the girl lay back on her pillow and closed her eyes.

"For gracious' sake, and so you have seen the world!" said Kykie. "And now you have come back to the old quiet life?"

"Not at all, Kykie. I'm going to persuade Luce to go about here, and meet people, and let me do the same."

"He'll never do it," said Kykie vehemently. "I can see that he is worse than ever about his mark."

"But he knows a lot of people here. I don't see how he can keep them from coming to the house; and I heard the boys saying that he had gone to the Club this afternoon. Surely that is a sign that he is not going to shut himself up again?"

"He may go to the Club, but he won't let anyone come here. He has given me strict orders that no one is to come in the front gates; they are to be locked and he will keep the key. Everything is to come by the back entrance and that, too, is to be locked."

Poppy's face clouded.

"Oh Kykie! I wouldn't mind if we were back in the old farm with the free veldt all round us; but to be shut up in a house and garden-(and with Luce's devils," she added to herself),-"even if it is a lovely garden!"

Kykie's face expressed lugubrious sympathy, but she held out no hope.

"You'll have to amuse yourself like you did before, with your music, and your reading, and writing, and be a good child," she said.

"But I'm not a child any longer. Can't you see how I've grown up?"

"I can see that you won't have to go and find milk-cactus to rub on your breasts any more," said Kykie, eyeing her with the calm candour of the native.

Poppy coloured slightly, and made occasion to throw a corner of the quilt over her bare shoulders and arms.

"For the sake of grace you needn't mind me," remarked Kykie. "Haven't I watched you many a moonlight night stealing down to where it grew by the old spruit?"

The girl's colour deepened; she gave a wistful little side glance at the old woman.

"I did so want to be beautiful. I would have dived to the bottom of the filthiest hole in that old spruit a dozen times a day to make myself the tiniest atom less ugly than I was. Do you remember that deep part where the water was so clear and we could see hundreds of crabs pulling pieces of flesh off the leg of the dead horse?"

"Oh sis yes! I wondered how you could go and look at the stinking thing day after day."

"I used to be pretending to myself that it was my aunt they were eating. Oh Kykie! I have some dark caves in my soul!"

"And no wonder, surely to goodness. Never will I forget the night we opened the door and you fell into the house, all blood and mud, and your eyes like a mal-meit's[3] flaring and flickering like the sulphur on a match."

[3] Mad-maid.

Poppy covered her eyes.

"Don't talk about it--"

At this time a telephone bell began to ring somewhere in the house, and Kykie on her feet in an instant, flew from the room at top speed. She came back later to say that Luce Abinger had called up to tell her he would not be home to dinner. Poppy was delighted.

"Oh Kykie! that means that he is dining with old friends; and it will do him so much good, and he'll want to be cheerful and sociable with all the world again, and we shan't be locked up any more," she cried all in one breath. "And now you needn't bother about dinner, but come and help me unpack, and I'll show you all my clothes and the nice things I've brought back for you."

"For me, gracious saints!"

"Yes, for you, you wicked old thing; silks and satins of every shade of the rainbow. You need never dress in anything else any more."

They spent an engrossed hour unpacking, and afterwards Poppy dined alone, and betook herself to the garden. She knew that she had the whole place and the whole long evening to herself, without disturbance, for it was a peculiarity of Kykie's that she could not keep her eyes open after nine o'clock at night. As for the boys, after they had performed their duties in the kitchen and stables, their time was their own, and they made the most of it elsewhere than within reach or sight of their employers.

It was early still, and though the darkness had fallen, the moon was at the full, and showed to advantage the solemn splendour of the trees, the long soft stretches of sward, and the festooned jungle-like arbours and arcades. In many a winding path she lost her way (for the place was of enormous extent), and had difficulty in locating once more the house or the gate or any point she was acquainted with. Coming to the gate once she tried it, and finding it securely locked she shook it with the sudden fury of a wild thing that finds itself caged. Then she stood still, and presently two great tears rolled down her face; but afterwards her wanderings became curiously systematised. Taking the gate as her starting-post she commenced a détour of the wilderness, keeping to its outskirts and examining as she travelled every inch of the enclosing walls. The part which gave on to the main road she found to be hopelessly impregnable; it had first a high stone wall with a cresting of particularly sharp and jagged bottle-glass; and further, was backed by a species of laurel that grew both tall and bushy, and rattled aggressively if anyone so much as looked at it. Then came a long side-stretch of thick-set green bushes of what she judged-after pinching the leaf and smelling it-to be quince, with an undergrowth of pink pepper. After penetrating this, in a weak spot, and discovering that the outside rampart consisted of galvanised iron, standing lengthways and painted dark green, she did not feel so confident, but she went bravely on, until at last she came to a gate; it also was made of iron and painted green, but though it was unlocked, Poppy did not go through it, for she saw beyond, the stables and iron houses that were evidently the quarters of the black servants. She could hear their voices and the sound of a concertina. Plainly this was the back compound, through which all trades-people must make their way to the house. No doubt there was an entrance at the other side-but it was not for Poppy! She proceeded. The wall continued of the same quality, monotonously familiar; then occurred an impassable jungle that it would have taken a herd of buffalo to make any impression upon. After beating round this for some time, to the detriment of her trailing white gown, Poppy pursued her way with a frowning brow and a quivering under-lip. Next came a hedge of prickly-pear; she turned her head away from this in disgust. Farmers plant prickly-pears round their gardens to keep out cattle. It is the most perfect barrier in the world. Certainly, a human being might cut his way through it; but he would spend the rest of his life picking from his festering flesh tiny invisible white thorns. On and on she marched; it seemed to her that the large pale hands of the pear-hedge flapped mockingly at her. Sometimes she was obliged to make a wide détour to avoid a clump of trees, or a rockery, or a summer-house with a pergola leading to it, smothered with vines and passion-flowers and roses. It seemed that she walked miles and miles. Suddenly she saw light glimmering through a trellised opening, and ran forward. Her hands touched cold wrought-iron. It was the front gate! This time, when she shook it, she did not cry. Her gown was torn, her hair was loosened, there was a scratch on her cheek and blood on her hands, but she laughed.

"Ah, my very dear Luce Abinger," she said, "we shall see if you can keep a creature of the veldt behind a padlock."

Immediately she recommenced a fresh tour of the garden, and though the long hot day and all its incidents must have told upon her strength, she seemed to have suddenly acquired fresh life and buoyancy. She had that within which urged her on-a taste for liberty. At that time it seemed to her that the whole world was too small a place for a free spirit; and that if this were indeed the world, she would somewhere find some desperate edge and leap over, even if it should be into the abyss of nothingness. On this tour she included the arbours and the summer-houses in her itinerary. The third one she came to was only a small hut of a place, but it had a long spire to its roof, and from thence trailed and hung long lines and stalks of the passion plant-everyone knows it: vine-leaved, with great round cream-coloured flowers, a purple outer ring divided into ten thousand tiny leaves, signifying the crowd that gathered to listen to Christ on the Mount; and in the centre, mysteriously arranged, like the dishes upon the table of some oracle, the three loaves and the five fishes! They call it the grenadilla in Africa, and eat its fruit with port wine and cream. Poppy dived in under the trailing vinery, and entered the hut. All round it had a low seat running, but everything was old and damp and rotten she could feel by the touch, and in one place the wood crumbled under her fingers, and thrusting her arm forward, she was able to feel that it was part of the wall itself; there was no further barrier beyond.

She had found an exit.

For a time she sat still on the cool mossy floor of the arbour, trembling a little at the thought of the spiders and strange beasts that might be dropping upon her from above. At last she nerved herself to the point of pushing and urging and disentangling the thick partition of green that kept her in. Her idea was to make an opening without making a gap; something she could re-arrange afterwards, leaving no sign of disturbance.

At length she was through, and behold! she found herself in another garden. Was it a maze too, she wondered rather drearily? A maze without an opening? But no, there was a pleasing openness of view about the place. A few bushes and trees, a straggly flower-bed or two. Almost immediately she came upon a gravelled path; but she did not walk on it, choosing rather to follow its direction by way of the grass and soft earth which enflanked it. In the natural course of events a house was discovered. Quite a simple affair of galvanised iron, painted green, with a verandah running all round it and heaps of shrubs and bushes and creepers to hide its nakedness. Its front verandah was full of pale, heavenly light that was certainly not contributed by the moon; nor could the words that came floating over the bushes into the garden, be, by the wildest and most poetic imagination, endowed with a heavenly meaning.

"Oh, damn it, I'm sick of this rotten typewriter and everything else in the world. I wish Brookie would type his own beastly law-papers."

Poppy approached with the utmost gentleness, and through the screen of a bush covered with tiny pink flowers that smelt of musk she surveyed the scene.

The room itself was terrible as an army with banners. It contained "gypsy-tables," antimacassars, "what-nots," plush fans upon the walls, indescribable villainies of wool and paper, a crewel-worked mantel-border, and every atrocity under the moon. In the midst of all was a good solid mahogany table, with a typewriting-machine on it, and seated before this was a girl. For pity of herself Poppy was glad to see another girl; and more especially a girl who, like herself, appeared to have reason to be bored with her surroundings and the general management of the universe. In the enthusiasm engendered by a fellow-feeling, she had an inclination to march in and take the girl to her heart, but after a further survey she changed her mind.

In a large, ripe fashion, the girl was very good-looking indeed, with a tall and generous figure of the kind that attracts prompt and frank attention from the generality of men, but is not deeply admired by other women. Her face was of a familiar Colonial type, large-featured but well-shaped, with big brown eyes, rather inclined to roll, suggestive of what is known as "a dash of colour"; a mouth of the kind that expresses nothing at all until the twenties, when by the aid of a retroussé nose, grown unaccountably coarse it suddenly expresses things which should be left unexpressed; a round, rather plump chin, and masses of dark hair which had been sadly maltreated by curling-irons, and had a dusty appearance. On the whole a handsome girl, probably good-natured enough for the ordinary purposes, and of a personality pleasing enough for an ordinary acquaintance.

Certainly not a girl to be made a friend of, thought Poppy, and decided that she would go no further.

"I'll wait and see first if Luce is going to let me out to meet nice people," she thought. "If he doesn't, this girl may help to pass away an idle hour sometimes, and she might serve as one of the characters in my novel. At any rate she could teach me to use the typewriter, and I could teach her not to live in a chamber of horrors."

With these reflections she stole back soft-footed in her tracks, and through her little exit-hole, which she covered up with the greatest care and skill, for fear that in the future it should prove to be her only mode of entrance into the world of men and women she longed to know.

For a whole week she refrained from broaching to the tyrant of the house the subject which lay uppermost in her thoughts. For one thing she thought it would be well to allow him to regain some semblance of good humour; for another she wished to give him full opportunity and time to make daily excursions into the town and lunch and dine with his friends, so that she might have some grounds for the reproaches she meant to level at him when she demanded freedom. In the meantime she was absorbed in affairs which included the inspection and re-arrangement of every room in the house, excepting only Abinger's, which she never ventured near. Touches of her personality soon lay upon everything, from the chintzes in the drawing-room which she had chosen herself at Waring's, and sent out to Kykie for the making, down to the curtaining of Kykie's own bedroom windows with some cobwebby snowy muslin she had bought in Shanghai. She spent several hours every day at the piano, playing old Irish melodies, for which she had a passion, and of which she had made an enormous collection; but she always waited until Luce was out of the house, for he had a peculiar aversion to melodies of any kind and more especially Irish melodies. He said:

"There may have been something in them when the strolling poets played them on their harps, but since that fellow Moore made them pretty, I consider them damned mawkish."

So Poppy kept her melodies to herself. The rest of her time was divided between studying literature, writing, dreaming and wandering in the garden, which became dearer to her day by day.

At last, one evening, on hearing from Kykie that Abinger would be dining at home, she made herself look as charming as possible in a pale maize satin gown with a wreath of green leaves on her hair, and went down prepared to do battle.

Luce Abinger was already in the drawing-room, standing at one of the French windows, staring out into the garden-a sombre, solitary figure. She noticed, as often before, how tall and well-built he was, and the fine line of his head under the smooth, fair hair. He always looked distinguished and well-born in evening-dress. At the sound of Poppy he turned, and the lights shining on his maimed and distorted face, showed her that he was entertaining at least seven devils. A mental shiver passed through her and hope fell several degrees; but she advanced with a serene smile and a gay word. She had long ago learnt to control the expressions of her face, so that he might not guess the mingled terror, pity, and repulsion he often roused in her; and though she knew that in most things he had intuition as cruel as the grave, she believed that in this, at least, she was able to deceive him.

The second gong had not yet sounded. She sat down at the piano and ran her fingers up and down the keys by way of bracing up her nerves.

"Luce," she began, "I hope you are in a good temper, for I want to talk to you very seriously about something."

He gave a croaking sort of laugh.

"Oh certainly. I am at my very b-best. It is only necessary for you to p-play an Irish melody to have me p-purring at your feet. Il ne manquerait plus que ?a."

This was inauspicious, but Poppy refused to be daunted; and the gong sounding at this moment, she rose and put her hand upon his arm, saying cheerfully:

"That's right, come along then, we'll talk it over in the dining-room."

His smile was grim. They sat down to dinner, and Babiyaan and Umzibu, arrayed in white, hovered over them like guardian angels. Abinger ate little and said nothing. Only when the boys were not in the room he fixed his eyes on Poppy in a curious way that caused in her a sensation of indescribable discomfort and annoyance. Once, for some unknown reason, she found herself remembering how she had covered herself up with the bed quilt from Kykie's eyes, and wishing that she had it round her now. She had never felt like that in a low gown before, and she could not understand it at all. For a time it quite unfitted her for the task she had in hand, but the idea occurring to her that this was perhaps what Luce intended, she plucked up heart again, and with the fruit fired her first shot.

"Luce, what are you going to do about getting me a chaperon?"

He gave a little jerk of his fruit-knife, so that she knew that he was taken unawares, otherwise he remained undisturbed by what she supposed must be something in the nature of a bomb-shell going off under his nose. He did not, however, proceed with the business of peeling his peach, and on giving him a swift side-glance, she found that he was smiling at her. Now, his smile was at no time an alluring affair, but when it was field day for his devils--!

"Am I not a sufficiently p-proper and responsible p-person to have the care of your young white s-soul?" he inquired blandly.

She knew that mood. Perhaps, after all, it would be better to postpone the discussion; but then, sometimes these fits of fury and rudeness lasted for months. It was impossible to wait all that time.

"I am not particularly concerned about my soul," she answered carelessly, dipping her fingers in the fine Venetian bowl before her and drying them delicately. One of Abinger's devils betrayed itself by laughing loudly and with character, but she did not even wince.

"Your young white b-body, then?" He pushed back his chair from the table with a horrible scrench on the polished floor.

"You talk like some odious sultan, but you forget that I am not a slave," she flashed back at him.

She pushed her chair from the table also, and loosening from her wrist a little painted inlaid fan which she had bought from a street-seller in Algiers, she essayed to cool her flushed face.

"Cigarettes, Babiyaan!" she said. "It is very hot; I think I will smoke out in the garden," she finished coldly to Abinger.

But he had risen too, and lounged in the doorway leading to the verandah.

"Oh, p-pray let us finish this interesting discussion."

They stood looking at each other for a moment: she, quite collectedly; he, smiling with his eyes and sneering with his mouth. Babiyaan, well aware that she was not allowed to smoke, knew better than to hand her the cigarettes, but placed them on the table and discreetly retired.

"There is no discussion, Luce," she said quietly, though her voice contained a tremor. "I simply want you to realise that it is impossible for me to go on living like this for ever. It isn't fair...." she added petulantly. He said nothing, only smiled. She regained her dignity and spoke more gently:

"I am a woman now, Luce, and it is only natural that I should wish to know other women-and men too."

At that he laughed raspingly.

"Why d-drag in the women?"

She looked at him scornfully. It was ridiculous of him to pretend that men meant more to her than women.

"It is unreasonable of you to expect me to spend my youth in secrecy and seclusion, just because you-" she stopped hastily.

"Go on!" he said with a devilish gaiety. "'Just because you happen to have a face like a mutilated b-baboon'-was that what you were going to say?"

"Oh Luce, you know it was not! Because ... because ..." she stood stammering with distress, while he stood grinning. "Because you don't happen to care for the society of other people-was what I was going to say.... Don't think," she went on appealingly, "that I don't appreciate all you have done for me. I remember it every day and every night.... I shall never forget it ... and though I know I can never repay you, I will show you all the rest of my life how grateful I am.... But I don't see what difference it would make to you to let me know a few people ... you have so many friends ... surely you know some nice women who would call on me--"

He broke out in a harsh voice, smiling no longer. "You are mistaken; I have no friends. The whole thing is out of the question and impossible."

"I don't see why it should be at all," she pursued valiantly; "if you get me some pleasant woman as a chaperon."

"In God's name what do you want with women?" he burst out. "A g-girl like you will never find a friend amongst them. They will hate you for your face, and your brains, and your youth.... They are d-devils all-lock, stock and barrel.... They'll rip you open and tear the story of your life out of you; if they once find out that you are a South African they'll never rest until they have nosed out the whole thing, and then they'll fling the t-tale to the four winds and the first thing you know you'll have your Bloemfontein aunt bearing down on you--"

"Oh Luce! I don't believe they're as bad as all that--"

"Then don't believe it," he retorted, with the utmost rudeness. "But understand one thing, I'll have no she-devils round this house."

"Very well, let them be he-devils," she flung back at him. "I am accustomed to those."

At that he stamped away from her towards the other door, gesturing with rage, and throwing broken words in her direction.

"Isn't my life bad enough already?... Oh Hades!... I wouldn't stand it for a minute ... curse all women ... don't ever talk to me about this again ... I tell you.... It's monstrous ... a lot of thieves and blackguards.... You're driving me out of my own house ... I shall go to the Rand to-morrow ... why, by God, I!..."

The door closed with a crash behind him.

* * *

AT two o'clock one afternoon Sophie Cornell walked into her sitting-room and flung upon the table by the side of her typewriter a great roll of MSS. She was gorgeously attired in a hat massed with roses of a shade that "never was on land or sea," and a furiously befrilled gown of sky-blue silk-muslin. But her face was flushed and heated, and her eyebrows met in a scowl of decided ill-temper. Opening a door that led through a long passage to the kitchen, she shouted:

"Zambani! Zambani! Checcha now with my lunch. Send Piccanin to lay table. Checcha wena!"

She flung her hat into one chair and herself into another, and stared at a telegram which she spread out before her.

"'Sorry can't come,'" she read, muttering; "'something better turned up; you understand!' Yes, I understand well enough! Just like the rotter to study her own convenience and throw me over at the last moment. What am I to do now, I'd like to know?"

She lolled in her chair and glared angrily at a small black boy in a blue twill tunic and short blue knickers above his knees, who was laying a cloth on one end of the table.

"Is there any soda in the house, Piccanin?" she demanded; and when he signified yes, ordered him to fetch it then and be checcha. In the meantime, she rose and unlocked from the sideboard a bottle of whiskey.

Lunch was a slovenly meal, consisting of burnt mutton-chops, fried potatoes, and a beet-root salad liberally decorated with rings of raw onion. Miss Cornell, however, ate heartily, and enjoyed a whiskey-and-soda. She then proceeded to attack a wobbly blanc-mange beringed with strawberry jam. Occasionally she demanded of some invisible personage:

"And what am I going to do now, I'd like to know?" and the scowl returned to her brows.

Suddenly, upon the front door which stood slightly ajar fell a soft knock. Miss Cornell's hands slipped to her hair, the scowl disappeared from her face, and in a high affected voice she called:

"Come in!"

Entered, with a shy and demure air, a girl dressed in the simplest kind of dress made of thin black muslin, with a white fichu over her shoulders falling in long ends below her waist. Her large white-straw hat had round it a wreath of lilac, which was of exactly the same colour as her eyes. Her lips were amazingly scarlet.

"I beg your pardon," she said in a soft, entrancing voice. "I am sorry to disturb you at your lunch--"

"That's all right," said Sophie affably; "I'm just done. Do sit down!"

The girl seated herself daintily. Sophie, observing that she wore no jewelry of any kind except a ring, in which the diamond was so large that it must surely be paste, decided that her visitor must be "hard up." She (Sophie) had not much of an opinion of that "black rag of a gown" either, but she thought she detected the faint murmur of a silk lining as her visitor moved. The lilac eyes looked at her winningly.

"I heard that you had a typewriting machine," she said, "and I wondered if you would be so good as to do a little typing for me-" She indicated a tiny roll of writing which she held in her hand. Miss Cornell sat up with an air.

"Oh, I don't take in work!" she said perkily. "I couldn't be bothered with that sort of thing. I'm sekertary to a gentleman who has an office down town."

"Lilac Eyes" regarded her calmly and did not seem overwhelmed by the importance of this communication.

"What a bother!" said she serenely.

Miss Cornell became languid.

"I get an enormous salary, and I have more work than I know how to get through already. Indeed, I am trying to get an assistant."

"Really?" said the other girl. "I wonder if I would suit you?"

"You!" Miss Cornell's face lit up with sudden interest and eagerness. She surveyed the other again. Of course, she was only a "hard-up" girl looking for work, and that air of gentle insolence that Sophie had been conscious of, was, after all, only "side" stuck on like the rose in the front of the simple black gown to hide poverty. Upon these reflections Miss Cornell's air became exceedingly patronising.

"You? Well, I don't know, I'm sure. Can you type?"

"Not at all. But I daresay I could soon learn."

"Oh well! I couldn't give you much salary if you are only a beginner."

"I shouldn't want any salary," said "Lilac Eyes"; but added quickly, as she saw the other's look of amazement: "At least, not for some months. If you would allow me to use your machine for my own work sometimes I should be repaid."

At this Sophie had neither the wit nor the patience to conceal her satisfaction. Her haughty air departed and she beamed with delight. She had suddenly seen a clear way through a very difficult impasse.

"You'll suit me down to the ground," she declared joyfully. "When can you move in?"

"Move in?" the other gave her a wondering smile. "Oh, I couldn't come to live-only for a few hours every day."

Sophie's face clouded again, but in a moment her eyes took on the absorbed look of a person who is rapidly reviewing a difficult situation. Presently she said:

"Well, perhaps that wouldn't matter so much if you wouldn't mind pretending sometimes that you live here."

The other girl looked puzzled.

"I'm afraid I don't quite understand."

"Well, if there's any chance of you're doing as I ask you, I'll explain," said Sophie; "but, of course, I don't want to talk about my private affairs if it's no good. There's nothing in the reason for pretending that you need object to," she added boldly. "What is the reason you can't come and live? Got a sick mother, or an old aunt, or something?"

The other hesitated for a moment, then her lovely lilac eyes took on a curious expression.

"Yes, I have an aunt," was her odd answer, but Sophie was no acute reader of eyes or odd answers.

"More fool you," said she cheerfully. "I'd like to see the old aunt who'd get me to support her. Well, all right now, if you think you'll come I'll tell you the whole thing."

"Yes, I think I'll come. But as I have said, it will only be for a few hours daily; sometimes in the mornings, more often in the afternoons."

"That'll do all right. Have a whiskey-and-soda and we'll talk it over."

"I don't care for whiskey, thank you," said "Lilac Eyes"; "but I am very thirsty, and will have some soda, if I may."

Sophie shouted to Piccanin to bring another glass, and pushed the soda and lemons across the table.

"Make yourself at home," said she affably; "but I hope you're not one of those asses who don't drink!"

"No, I drink if I want to-but not spirits."

"Oh, I know-those old Cape pontacs. Save me from them!" Miss Cornell looked piously at the ceiling. The other girl, who had never tasted Cape pontac in her life, only smiled her subtle smile.

Sophie seated herself in a lounge-chair, opposite her visitor, and crossed her legs, incidentally revealing her smart French-heeled shoes and a good deal of open-work stocking through which to lilac-coloured eyes her legs looked as though they were painted red. Piccanin meanwhile removed from the room the luncheon débris, his bare feet cheeping on the pale native matting and his long black eyes taking interested glances at the visitor whenever she was not looking his way.

"And now let's get to business," said Miss Cornell. "First of all, you haven't told me your name yet."

The lilac eyes were hidden for a moment under white lids, and a faint colour swept over the pale skin.

"Rosalind Chard."

"Well, I shall call you Rosalind, of course, and you can call me Sophie if you like. Sophie Cornell's my name. Rather pretty, isn't it?"

"Very," said Miss Chard in her gentle, entrancing voice.

"Well, now I'll tell you: I come from Cradock, in the Cape Colony, but I've been living all over the place since I left home. First, I went to stay with my sister in Kimberley. Have you ever been to Kimberley? Man! I tell you it's the most glorious place-at least, it used to be before everybody went to Jo ... you know Jo-burg, of course?"

Miss Chard shook her head.

"Never been to Johannesburg?" Sophie's tone expressed the utmost pity and contempt. "Well, but you're an English girl, I can see. Not been long out here, have you?"

"Only a week or so."

"Great Scott! you've got a lot to learn!"

Miss Cornell took a packet of cigarettes from her pocket and lit one. She then offered the packet to Miss Chard, who did not, however, take one.

"Don't smoke either? Och, what! You're not half a good fellow! Well, take off your hat, then. Do be sociable."

Miss Chard unpinned her floppy white hat and wore it on her knee for the rest of the interview. Sophie noticed the piled-up crown of black, black hair; also, the peculiar branching way in which it grew above the girl's brows. ("I wonder if she uses bay-rum to make it all dry and electriccy like that?" was her inward comment. "And I'll bet she wears a switch.")

"Well, to continue my tale-I had a lovely time in darling old Kimberley: dances, theatres, suppers, everything you can think of; then my sister's husband must needs go off and buy a rotten old farm at the back of nowhere-Barkly East, if you love me! They wanted me to come, too, but I said, Dead off! No, thanks! I want something more out of life than mountain scenery."

Rosalind Chard looked at her and could well believe it. At the moment Sophie reminded her of nothing so much as a full-blown cabbage-rose, dying to be plucked.

"And so you came here instead?"

"Well, no; first I went to Jo-burg, and I must say I had a heavenly time there; but-well-it didn't suit my health, so I became sekertary to an old snook called Johnson. He had been in Rhodesia, poking about in some ancient ruins there, and-oh, my garden flower!-the stuff he used to give me to write and type! And the way he used to bully me when I didn't get through it! And then complained of my spelling, if you please. I didn't stay with him any longer than I could help, you bet, though the screw was good. But I must tell you, such fun-just as I was going to leave him I discovered from his correspondence that he was going up to Zanzibar to make some researches for some rotten old society or other, so I stuck to him for another month. I thought I might as well get a passage to Durban for nix. So I started with him from the Cape, but when the boat touched here, I said, Good-bye, Johnnie! Oh crumbs! The row he made when he found me trekking!"

The listener's sympathy happened to be with the old snook, but Sophie was not asking for an opinion.

"And do you mean to say," demanded the latter unexpectedly, "that you would rather live with your old aunt than in a sweet little house like this, with me?"

Miss Chard did not mean to say anything at all as far as her own affairs were concerned.

"Never mind about me, Sophie," was her reply. "Tell me some more of your interesting adventures, and how you came to live in this sweet little house."

Miss Cornell's glance shifted from her new friend. She looked out of the window, round the room, at the pictures on the wall, at the typewriter-anywhere but into the two clear wells of lilac light opposite her, as she answered:

"I rent it, of course. I told you, didn't I, that I am sekertary to a man down town, named Brookfield. He thinks the world of me, and gives me a big salary; and then I get other work from a man called Bramham. Oh, I have more to do than I want, and I really had to get help, so I wrote last week to a pal of mine up in Jo-burg, and told her to come and join me. She promised, and I expected her right up till to-day, when I got a telegram, if you please, to say that she'd got something better. Wasn't that a low-down trick? And after I had told Brookfield and Bramham and all! Brookie gave me the morning off to go and meet her, and I waited for the train and found she wasn't in it, and when I got back to the office there was the telegram! Fortunately Brookie was gone from the office when I got back, so he doesn't know that she hasn't come."

"But why should it matter to him and to the other man whether she comes or not?"

Again Miss Cornell's glance took flight.

"Because of the work, of course-there's such tons to do ... and I can't get through it all by myself."

Miss Chard watched her narrowly.

"Well, but why do you wish me to pretend that I live here, and am your friend from Johannesburg?"

"You see, it's this way ... Brookie and Mr. Bramham take an interest in me.... They don't think that I ought to live alone here, and all that sort of rot-and if I could show you to them they'd think it was all right."

Miss Chard looked startled.

"Oh, I couldn't promise to meet strange men! I didn't suppose you would want me to do that or--"

An exasperated look came over Miss Cornell's face.

"You're not going to back out now, after me telling you everything?" she demanded angrily, but Miss Chard's scarlet lips took a firm line.

"I don't wish to meet strange people," she said. To her surprise, the other girl at once became propitiatory and beseeching.

"Well, but I won't ask you to meet anyone else. I'll keep you a deadly secret. And I can assure you that Brookie and Bramham don't matter in the least. Brookie is-well, to tell you the truth, he is entirely my property; he's crazily in love with me, and he won't bother you at all. Neither will Brammie, if it comes to that. He is an awfully nice man-everybody likes him, and he's fearfully rich too. He's married, and his wife lives in England for her health, they say, but of coarse that must be all rot. Anyway, he never goes into society at all-only has men friends."

"Well, what does he want here?" asked Miss Chard calmly, watching the flushed face before her.

"Nothing-nothing at all. It's only a matter of business, and a friendly interest in me, and all that-and, you see, as he employs me as well as Brookie, I have to be civil and ask him to tea sometimes."

It seemed to Miss Rosalind Chard that there was more in this than met the eye, but she was not able to fathom it at present. However, after listening to another long description of Mr. Bramham's inoffensiveness, she consented at last to be at the house one afternoon when he called.

"As for Brookie--" began Sophie, ready to open up another chronicle of guilelessness.

"No, no! I won't meet Brookie, I absolutely jib at Brookie!"

Sophie became lugubrious. "But he knows that you were to have arrived to-day--"

"Well," said Miss Chard decidedly. "Tell him that I came, but that I am as ugly as a monkey and as old as the sea. And now I must go, or my-aunt will be looking for me. I shall try and come in to-morrow and take a lesson on the typewriter. What time will be best?"

"You'll have to teach yourself, my dear. I go to the office every morning at ten, and I lunch in West Street, and don't get back until above five in the afternoon. But I'll bring you all the MSS. there is no immediate hurry for-and you can do it one day and I'll take it back the next. We shall get along like one o'clock."

"That's all settled then; good-bye!" Miss Chard had stepped out of the room into the verandah and was gone before Sophie could remove her high heels from the bars of the chair in front of her, where she had hooked them for extra ease and comfort. Inadvertently she listened for the click of the gate. But the gate did not click. Miss Chard, having got out of view of both house and gate, made a dash for the tall green hedge on the right side of the garden. Stooping down, she instantly disappeared.

A few moments later Poppy Destin sat in the passion-leaved summer-house, delicately smoking a cigarette and brushing all traces of dust from her thin black muslin gown. Between little puffs of smoke she presently spoke to herself.

"Certainly she is a terror ... a common mind, terrible clothes, Colonial slang ... I don't know that I can put up with her at all ... and those awful Brookies and Brammies! ... but it will be useful to be able to go through her garden whenever I want to make a little excursion into the world ... and, of course, I couldn't be there without some right or reason ... besides, it will be splendid to learn typewriting, and do all my own writing ready to send to the publishers ... but what a room! ... and those roses in her hat! Can such things be?... I must go and see whether Kykie has my tea ready."

* * *

A few days later it would have been hard to recognise the sitting-room of Sophie Cornell's little green bungalow. Books had spread themselves about the room, the tawdrinesses had been removed, flowers were everywhere, and a fine vine in a long glass crept delicately up the side of the mirror above the mantel. When Poppy had hinted that she would like to change the room a little, Sophie had good-naturedly given her carte-blanche to do anything she wished, saying:

"It was not my taste either, you know; but the place was furnished when I came into it and I haven't bothered to do anything since."

The only things Miss Cornell would not allow to be banished were the photographs of her numerous admirers, which she insisted on ranging along the narrow wooden ledge running round the room above the dado. They were in all degrees of preservation-some of them yellow with age or exposure, some quite new; all were autographed and inscribed. Some of the inscriptions ran thus: "From your loving Jack"; "To the best girl I know"; "To one of the best from one of the worst," etc. It was to be observed that the most ardent mots were merely initialled. But Sophie was equally proud of them all, and would exhibit them on the smallest provocation, giving a short narrative-sketch of each person which included the most striking features of his character, together with a thrilling account of his passion for her and the reason why she did not marry him.

"Now, isn't he good looking? Such a dear boy too ... and generous! My dear, that man would have given me the boots off his feet ... but there-he had no money; what was the good?... He's in Klondyke now ... I do hope he'll have luck, poor boy...."

"This is Captain Halkett. No, I don't know his regiment, and he never would give away his photos in uniform, though he had some perfectly lovely ones.... Someone told me he was a 'cashier' in the Army ... but that was silly, of course ... there are no such things as cashiers in the Army, are there? ... he simply adored me ... he gave me this bangle ... such a darling ... but he was married-or, of course--"

"Oh, that is Jack Truman, of Kimberley. Everyone knows him ... a fearful devil, but most fascinating.... Isn't he handsome? ... such eyes ... you simply couldn't look into them, they made you blush all over. The women were all crazy after him, but he told me he didn't give a pin for any of them except me.... He wanted me to run away with him ... but he had a wife in a lunatic asylum ... obliged to allow her forty pounds a month, and he was dreadfully in debt ... they tried to arrest him at Cape Town, but he got away dressed like a woman ... and now he is in the Australian Mounted Police, they say.

"And, of course, you know who this is? One of the biggest men on the Rand ... with thousands, my dear.... Och! you should see him in riding kit ... you never saw any one look so perfectly noble ... he was madly in love with me ... everybody said so ... he told me I was the only girl who could ever keep him straight ... but he behaved rather badly.... I always believe some snake of a woman made mischief ... and when he went to England, one of those English girls snapped him up ... they live out at Jeppestown now ... and they say she's the living image of me ... funny, isn't it?... but I think it just proves how he adored me, don't you?"

Listeners of defective vision and an over-developed sense of credulity might have believed that Helen of Troy II had come to town-unless they had been long enough in South Africa to realise that the best way to enjoy a little quiet humour is to take a Cape-Colonial girl at her own valuation.

Poppy listened to all with tranquil eyes. She was willing to believe that it might be true that Sophie was admired and adored and desired. But in the type of men who formed the army of admirers and adorers and desirers she could not pluck up the faintest kind of interest. It seemed to her that it was impossible that any man worth knowing could forgive the size of Sophie's hands and the shape of her feet, the look about her mouth, the paint on her face, and the dust in her hair.

She was aware, however, that life in South Africa is too busy and too eventful to allow men much time for digging into personality-and that it has to suffice, as a rule, if the surface-metal shines pleasantly and looks like the real thing. Sophie's surface, no doubt, had an attractive glitter, but Poppy felt sure that if anyone with the time and inclination for such occupation had ventured to go a-quarrying into the nature of Sophie Cornell, the output would be found to be surprising, even in a land where surprises are every-day fare and the unexpected is the only thing that ever happens.

* * *