“Well done, well done,” cried Aletta, clapping her hands enthusiastically. “I shall make a convert of you yet. Oh yes, I shall.”
It became bedtime. As she gave him his candle Colvin once more could not help being struck with the refined grace of Aletta’s every movement—the soft, clear, thoroughbred tone of her voice. She seemed somehow to have been cast in a different mould from her sisters, to whom he had always pictured her as inferior both in looks and presence. It fairly puzzled him. The tones of her voice seemed to linger long after he had retired. He had had a long, tiring, exciting day—had undergone a very narrow escape for his life—which circumstance, by the way, he had not yet mentioned to his host, being desirous to sleep on it first, and having enjoined strict silence upon his retainer—yet, now that he should have dropped into a sound, recuperative slumber, he could not. And the sole reason that he could not—as he must perforce admit to himself in the darkness and privacy of his chamber—was the recollection of this girl whom he had met but the first time that night—here, on a remote Dutch farm in the Wildschutsbergen. And she was “only a Boer girl!”
Chapter Ten.
“If—.”
“Well, child, and what do you think of ‘our only Englishman’?” said Mrs De la Rey, as they were putting away the “early coffee” things the following morning.
“I like him, mother,” replied Aletta. “I oughtn’t to because I have heard so much about him. That is sure to start one with a prejudice against anybody. Still, I think I shall. Oh, wasn’t Tant’ Plessis killing about ‘the only Englishman’ and ‘the only English girl’? By the way, was there anything in it?”
“Don’t ask me. I don’t know,” laughed her mother. “Only he seemed a little too anxious to deny it. One can never tell. May Wenlock is a very pretty girl.”
“Is she? I never saw her. I remember Frank Wenlock—a good sort of boy, but something of a lout. Now, this one is ever so different.”