The little deeds of all her yesterdays appeared suddenly insignificant to her, and she began to feel that life, and the happiness of life, was something far greater than she had supposed. She wondered why she had been troubled with regard to Daniel: he was just an expression of nature, as she was: and here, in the solitude he so dearly loved, she seemed to understand for the first time his scorn of the intricacies of modern civilization. Here all was so simple, so devoid of complexities, that she laughed aloud. It was only her wits, the mere fringe of her mind, which had veiled her spirit from his spirit; but now she had shaken herself loose from these ornamentations of life, and stood as it were, revealed like a lost fragment dropped at last into place in the great design.
She rose to her feet at length, with a sense of light-heartedness such as she had never before known; and, returning to the camp in the gathering dusk, she looked with amused pity at Benifett Bindane who sat in a deck-chair reading the Financial News by the light of a glass-protected candle.
“Just look at him!” said Kate, who, herself, had been admiring the sunset. “Isn’t it pitiful?”
Mr. Bindane laid the paper down, and stared at his wife with uncomprehending eyes.
“The market is showing a good deal of weakness in Home Rails,” he said to his wife; “but your South Africans are all buoyant enough, so you needn’t worry.”
“Worry!” exclaimed Kate, contemptuously, and turned from him to the fading light in the west.
“I’m glad I bought those Nitrates,” he went on, addressing the back of her neck; “they’re improving, so far as one can tell from the closing quotations given here.”
He held the newspaper out, but she struck at it viciously with her hand.
“Oh, for God’s sake shut up!” she cried. “It’s money, money, money all the time with you.”
“I was speaking,” he said, very slowly, and as though he had been hurt, “of stock I had bought for you, my dear.”