Again they stood looking at each other in silence, as though reading each other. He was thinking of how he had seen her last night—bright, sparkling, girlish—full of humour and merriment; yet even then he had judged her temperament to have another side. Now his judgment was borne out. She could show herself serious, grave, judicious—in short, full of character when a matter of moment was under discussion. She for her part was thinking that of all the men she had met, and she had met many—for Stephanus De la Rey was connected with some of the best old Dutch families at the Cape, and in the society of the capital, Dutch or English, Aletta had not merely had the entrée, but had been in request—she had never come into contact with one who was quite like this. He was right outside her ordinary experience.
A sound of approaching hoof-strokes aroused them—on Aletta’s part with something of a start. A bridle path threaded the garden here, affording a considerable short cut up from the river drift, and the horseman now advancing along this had come out through the quince hedge almost upon them. In him they recognised Adrian De la Rey.
“Daag, Aletta. I have only just heard you were home again,” he said in Dutch, as he sprang from his horse and shook hands with her. But Colvin did not fail to notice that the young Boer’s greeting of himself was markedly cold, not to say grim.
“So ho!” said he to himself. “That is the way the cat jumps? I see.” Then aloud, “What sort of rifle have you there, Adrian?” For the latter was clad and armed as though for the chase, and had a bandolier full of cartridges slung round him.
“One of the new kind,” was the crisp reply. “A Mauser. Ja, you can kill a man at thousands of yards with this.”
“So you could, if you could only see him,” was the perfectly good-humoured reply.
“I shall see him plainly enough, at whatever distance. Ja, at whatever distance,” repeated the young Boer with meaning; and, looking as black as thunder, he turned his back upon the other in rather a pointed manner, and began to converse with his cousin.
“Yet,” said Colvin to himself, “yet we have always been the best of friends. But that would prove a very awkward customer if— Yes,” he repeated, always to himself. “If—”
Note 1.