“Great minds jump together then, for so am I. In fact, I’m thinking of her every day, every moment of my life.”
“If you were to think a little more of her interests, then, it would be better all round.—For instance—I don’t say it with any wish to be inhospitable, mind!—but by the time you get back you’ll have been about twenty-fours hours away from home, and that quite unnecessarily. That’s not the way to run a farm—and especially one like yours. I don’t wonder your people get ‘slaag-ing,’ and all the rest of it.”
This was not a fair hit, thought Wyvern to himself. A decided case of “below the belt.” But he said nothing. He merely puffed away at his pipe, looking straight in front of him. The mist seemed lightening a little above the river.
“Well, then, if the worst comes to the worst, and you have to leave Seven Kloofs, what then? How will you stand? The sale of your stock won’t amount to anything like a fortune I take it.”
“No, but it’ll amount to something. After that—I have an idea.”
“An idea. Pho! That for an idea. One plan’s worth all the ‘ideas’ in the world.”
Le Sage, you see, had got into his element now. His nervousness had quite left him.
“Call it a plan then. And as to it I am hopeful. Why should a man’s luck always be bad, Le Sage. Why the deuce shouldn’t good times dawn for him? Ah! Look there.”
Even as he spoke the mist, which had been lightening over the river, parted with a suddenness that was almost startling, and from a widening patch of vivid blue the newly risen sun poured down his life-giving beams. It was as an instantaneous transition from darkness to light—to bright, beautiful. Nature-awakening light—and with it the birds began to pipe and call with varying note from the surrounding bushes, while a troop of monkeys gambolling upon a sandspit down in the river-bed, were amusing themselves by leaping its channel, to and fro, as though in sheer gladness of heart. Further and further the mist rolled back, unfolding a dewy sparkle upon bush and veldt, a shroud as of myriad diamonds.
“Look—where?” queried Le Sage, shortly.