“‘Old ’uns?’” echoed Verna, raising her eyebrows. “Why, you don’t call Mr Denham old?”
“Oh, that’s drawn you, has it?” cried Ben. “Quite right, dear. He isn’t old.”
Under her father’s straight gaze and quizzical laugh Verna could not for the life of her restrain a slight change of colour.
“I shall have to give you such a pinch, dear, if you talk like that,” she said. “One that’ll hurt.”
The two were standing among the rose-bushes in the garden of the Nodwengu Hotel. It was a lovely morning, though Alp-like masses of cloud in the distance gave promise of thunder. Ben Halse had been detained longer than he had reckoned on, but had found it unnecessary to go on to Durban. In a day or two he expected to return home. The time at Ezulwini went by pleasantly enough. The trader had several old friends in the place, and Verna was in request for tennis, here or there. So, too, was Denham, who had at once been made free of the ready friendliness of a small community.
“Talking of Denham,” went on Ben Halse, puffing at a newly lighted pipe that would only half draw, “it’s a rum thing, Verna, that just as you had been wondering what sort of chap he was he should have turned up here.”
“Yes, isn’t it? But I hope he won’t find it too rough with us,” she added somewhat anxiously.
“Not he. Didn’t he say he’d knocked about in South America? I expect it’s a sight rougher in parts there than here. He’s a man who takes things as they come, rely upon it. And he doesn’t put on an atom of ‘side.’”
Incidentally, “side” is the unpardonable sin among our colonial brethren, and rightly so.
“No, that he certainly doesn’t,” assented Verna decisively. “Oh, I dare say it’ll be all right.”