“Adrian? Oh, he went long ago—soon after you did.”
Keenly watching her face, while not appearing to, he does not fail to notice the tinge of colour which comes into it as she answers. So Adrian has been trying his luck then; but, has he succeeded? How shall he find out? But why should he find out? What on earth can it matter to him?
Yet throughout the evening the one question he is continually asking himself, and trying to deduce an answer to, is—
Has he succeeded?
Chapter Twelve.
“The Only English Girl.”
May Wenlock was in a temper.
She had got up in one, and throughout the morning her mother and brother had had the full benefit of it. Why she was in it she could not have told, at least with any degree of definitiveness. She was sick of home, she declared; sick of the farm, sick of the very sight of everything to do with it; sick of the eternal veldt. The mountains in the background were depressing, the wide-spreading Karroo plains more depressing still, although, since the rain, they had taken on a beautiful carpeting of flower-spangled green. She wanted to go away—to Port Elizabeth, or Johannesburg; in both of which towns she had relatives; anywhere, it didn’t matter—anywhere for a change. Life was too deadly monotonous for anything.