'Oh, do promise you'll come every month,' he said. 'Weeks are so long, and the one mail-day a week comes always terribly slowly. Do promise.'
John promised faithfully.
Next day they went back to the homestead, a dull little iron building on a rather feverish site. 'If I were you,' said John, 'I'd build where you have been lying sick. I don't like the look of this other place at all.'
'Yes, I shall build in High Wood; I want to call it so now. It's a magical place, I think: I shall always feel something is home-like when I'm there.'
Life was growing brighter to him. His fever-fancy had opened his eyes a little to the charm of the new country it was, at least, here and there, not unlike the old country.
'I think I shall fancy this place more now,' he said to John on the morning they parted. 'But, oh, if you could only have seen that little place of mine five miles from Sevenoaks!'
'Look here!' said John. 'You've got a bigger estate here than ever you had there, and you can find the same sort of interests in it. Study your Kaffir tenants, and help them with ideas about stock and ploughing and church and school. Your neighbors don't. Well, more simpletons and arrant wasters, they! Believe me, you'll find the new life much more like the old life in Kent, if you do. Then study tree-planting, and look after this grand old native timber. Expect me next month, on the 23rd.'
He went away and left Benson lonely. But the real blackness of his loneliness was gone. The planning of the new homestead would keep him busy for a long while now. Was not healing virtue exuding from that soil, which the happy dreams of his recovery had consecrated? His fever had given him a new point of view, or rather given him back his old Kentish point of view delight in God's own country sights and scenes, care for his tenants, and hope.
LE ROI EST MORT
The railway had almost crept up to Alexandra Then—the seventy-three miles of its sandy pilgrimage were all but complete. In three months or so it would be open to those who could afford their penny a mile no, but I am forgetting, on the privileged group to which it belongs no European may travel third-class.