“Darling, let me go in and get you a wrap,” he said eagerly. “You’re chilly.”
“No. I don’t want a wrap. I don’t know what it is, but I feel a sort of presentiment, as if something was going to happen. I’ve been feeling it all the afternoon, but I wouldn’t say anything about it for fear of communicating it to Mrs Waybridge and making you laugh at me.”
“As if I should ever do that. Now chuck off this presentiment, my Hazel. Why, yesterday afternoon you were saying you would always feel so safe with me—with me,” he added tenderly. “That was one of the sweetest things I’ve ever heard you say.”
“Was it? Well, then, Dick, it’s true. Oh, there are those horrid cattle groaning again. Will they never leave off?”
“But they often do it. If I were to drive them away they’d be back again in a minute or two. What does it matter? It pleases them and doesn’t hurt us.”
“It’s eerie, all the same,” she said, with another shiver.
The point of which remark was that the cattle, turned out at night to graze around the homestead, had collected at a place down by the kraals, where sheep were slaughtered, and with their noses to the ground, were emitting a series of groaning noises, culminating in a sort of shrill bellow. Then they would scurry away for a few yards, and returning to the blood-saturated spot, would repeat the performance again and again. After all, it was not an unusual one. On moonlight nights, especially, would it be enacted. To-night, however, in the darkness, the effect was particularly weird and dismal.
“Talking of old Hesketh,” went on Dick, bent on taking her mind off dismal fancyings, “I wonder how the fine old chap will cotton to me as a nephew, eh?”
“Now, Dick, you’re getting ‘too previous,’” she answered, with a laugh. “Why, what can that be?”
A glow was suffusing the far sky, growing brighter and brighter. It seemed to be in the direction of their ride of the day before, “Moon rising, I suppose,” said Dick, re-lighting his pipe.