“Hear, hear!” cried Roden. “Well, Mrs Suffield, you have mistaken your vocation. You ought to have been a preacher—a good, out-and-out, whole-souled tub-thumper. However, you seem determined I am destined to glut the assegai of John Kaffir, and as you are so savage on the subject, it is to Mona I shall impart my last will and testament—orally, of course. So, come along, Mona, and give it, and me, your most careful attention.”
Left alone on the stoep, the husband and wife laughed softly together, as they watched Mona’s white dress disappear in the darkness.
“All is coming right, as I told you it would, Grace. Musgrave is a precious careful bird; but he’s limed safe and sound at last. Mark my words.”
“You needn’t be so awfully vulgar about it, Charlie. That’s quite a horrid way of putting things.”
Now in the silence and darkness those two wandered on—on beneath the loaded boughs of the fruit garden, and on by the low sod wall, then out in the open, and finally into gloom beneath the drooping, feathery branches of the willows. It was a silence unbroken by either, unless—unless for a soft shuddering sigh, which followed upon a long kiss.
In the dark and velvety moonless vault great constellations flashed as though they were fires, throwing out the black loom of the distant mountains away beyond the open waste, and flaming down into the smooth mirror of the water, upon which the willow boughs trailed. Even beneath the shadowy gloom their light pierced; shining upon the white dress, and throwing the large, supple figure of the girl into ghostly relief.
“I love you, Mona. Here on the very spot where we first beheld each other, I tell you I love you. And you had better have let me fall to my death, shattered to atoms that day, than that I should tell it you.”
The tone, a trifle unsteady, but firm and low, was rather that of a man unfolding a revelation of a painful but wholly unavoidable nature than the joyous certainty of a lover, who knew his passion was returned in measure as full as the most ardent could possibly desire. But the girl for a moment made no answer. Her lips were slightly parted in a smile of unutterable contentment, and the light in her eyes was visible under the stars. Again he kissed the upturned lips, long and tenderly as he had never done before.
“Yes. This is the spot where we first met,” she said at last, with a glad laugh in her voice. “My hammock was slung there—and look, there it is still. I remember so well what we were talking about that day. Grace was predicting that my time would certainly come, and I said I didn’t believe anything of the kind, but I rather hoped it would. And I had hardly said so when—oh, darling! you came up! And it has all been so entrancingly sweet ever since. Life has been entirely different, and I am quite a transformed being.”