“Make a ‘patriot’ of me, you mean, Adrian. I am that already in the real meaning of the word. Well, Colvin, what have you been doing lately? It’s a long time since I’ve seen you.”
“That so, Stephanus? Oh, all sorts of things—farming, and hunting, and taking it easy generally.”
“And making love to that pretty Miss Wenlock,” said Condaas, the younger girl, in a sly undertone.
Colvin turned, with a laugh. He and this household were upon quite intimate terms, and he had been exchanging greetings all-round during the colloquy between uncle and nephew.
“There would be every excuse, wouldn’t there?” he answered, entering into the joke, and, moreover, hugely amused, remembering that almost the last words May had spoken to him had been to chaff him about these very girls, and now almost their first words had been to chaff him about her.
“You ought not to say that in our presence,” said Andrina, with a mimic pout.
“Of course not. But if you had not interrupted me I was going to add—‘but for the fact of the propinquity of Ratels Hoek and the entrancing but utterly perplexing choice of counter-attractions it affords.’”
“Why will you make those girls talk such a lot of nonsense, Mr Kershaw?” laughed Mrs De la Rey. “They always do whenever you come here. I declare you are making them very dreadful.”
“Didn’t know I exercised such influence over the young and tender mind. It isn’t I who do it, Mrs De la Rey. It’s Adrian there. Depend upon it, he is the delinquent.”
Now Adrian was a good-looking, well-set-up young fellow, who, his fiery “patriotism” notwithstanding, had his clothes built by an English tailor and talked English fluently. Indeed, in the De la Rey household it was spoken almost as frequently as the mother tongue, and the above conversation had been carried on about equally in both languages, gliding imperceptibly from one to the other and back again.