“Help you? Yes—like the other evening when we went to voor-ly for a bush-buck over Slaang Draai, and you talked so much that although we sat there till it was dark none came out. Now what sort of ‘help’ is that?”
He looked down into the bright, teasing face, and thought he had seldom—or was it ever?—looked upon any sight which delighted him more.
“Well, you helped me to talk anyhow,” he said. “Now didn’t you?”
One form of sport was to gain a point overlooking this or that bushy kloof about an hour before sundown and sit still, waiting till the bush-bucks began to move. Thus a shot was to be obtained when one showed upon an open space. Dick Selmes, who had become a very fair rifle shot, had bagged several this way. The occasion to which the girl had referred was one on which he had persuaded her to accompany him—with the remit described.
“Never mind,” he went on, without waiting for her answer. “It was no end jolly all the same. Wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know. I seem to remember it became no end cold,” she laughed. “But you’re trying to get away from the point. You must go and shoot a buck for me this afternoon. Why, you hardly ever hunt now. You’re getting quite lazy.”
It was a coincidence that her uncle should be making substantially the same remark about a quarter of a mile away.
“Lazy! I like that. How about all those jolly rides we’ve been having? Lazy!”
“Well, I didn’t mean it in its strictly literal sense,” she answered. “Yes, I have enjoyed those rides.”
Hazel had been about a fortnight at Haakdoornfontein, and during that time she and Dick Selmes had become very friendly indeed. It was the old story—youth, mutual attraction and propinquity, and but for the fact that she was the stronger minded of the two, and adhered to a rigid resolution not to neglect her self-imposed household duties, it is probable that their elders would have seen very little of her or of either of them.