“Have I been so hard on you as that? I didn’t mean to be. By the way, you are not smoking. Try some of this,” reaching down an open bag of Magaliesberg from a shelf.
“Thanks. I say, what’s this?” looking at the bullet hole in the wall.
“Oh, that’s nothing,” she answered rather shamefacedly. “At least, you heard all about it down at Ezulwini. Anyway, it’s nothing to brag about. Let’s go outside.”
“Certainly,” acquiesced Denham, grasping, with ready tact, that she did not wish to pursue the subject. And he was right. Even as in the matter of shooting the koodoo she shrank from dwelling upon anything that would tend to set her forth in his eyes as a strong, self-reliant Amazon type of woman; more so now than then.
“I wish I was more like other girls, Mr Denham,” she broke forth with that winning, breezy naturalness which had so struck him. “If I were musical, for instance, and all that, I could play to you of an evening. I’m afraid you must find the evenings so slow.”
“I’ve only had one evening here, and I didn’t find that a bit slow,” he answered. “Incidentally, the other evenings we have spent together have been anything but slow.”
“Together!” There was something in the word, and the way in which he said it, that struck curiously upon her ears.
“I’m glad of that,” she answered. “One always thinks that anybody out from England, accustomed to the livelier sides of life, must become hideously bored in an out-of-the-way wilderness such as this really is.”
“It’s a very beautiful wilderness, anyway,” he said, looking out over the great panorama of mountain and plain and forest, extending over fifty miles, and misty in the heat of the unclouded sunlight. “But that’s where you make the mistake. The very contrast is so infinitely restful. Not only restful, but invigorating. Slow! Think, for instance, of all the vividly interesting stories and reminiscences your father has been telling me since we first met, and especially during our journey here. Why, they make this wonderful country simply glow with life—and such life! The life which puts those ‘livelier sides of life’ you were just quoting into a dull, drab groove of monotony. No, don’t for a moment imagine there is the slightest possibility of a chance of my feeling bored.”
There was a vehemence, an intensity, about this deliverance that rather astonished Verna. This man had another side, then? She had read him wrong, or at least not quite right, when she had just sized him up as an even, prosperous man of the world, one whose self-possession nothing could ruffle, a charming companion, but one past anything in the shape of a great enthusiasm. Now she began to realise that she had not seen every side of him, and the discovery in no way diminished her interest in him.