“By Jove!” said Christopher, “that up-country fever is the very mischief once you get it on you. But, Hilda, write and tell him to come down here sharp—whether he leaves his few goats or not. They’re bound to die anyhow. This air will set him up on his legs again in no time—and meanwhile he can be looking around. Tell him to bring his friend too. By the way, what’s the other man’s name?”
“He doesn’t say—only that he’s a man from England. I’ll write this very evening,” she answered.
Violet Avory’s prettily expressed concern was but the foreground to an instinctive inward conjecture as to what the stranger would be like. Poor Renshaw’s illness was not an event to move her much, and poor Renshaw himself faded into background beside the possibilities opening out before her in the advent of a stranger—a stranger from England too. Truth to tell, she was becoming a trifle bored. The incense of male adoration, as essential to her as the very breath of life, had not floated much in her direction of late; for the Umtirara range, though scenically and climatically a comparative Eden, was yet to all purposes, as far as she was concerned, an Adamless one. A stranger—lately from England! There was something delightfully exciting in the potentialities here opening out.
“Tell him he must come, Hilda!” said Marian, with, for her, a strange eagerness. “Poor—poor Renshaw! He’ll never shake off that horrible fever up there in such an awful drought-stricken desert. Tell him he must come, and come at once!”
And yet of these two it was for her who was moved to excitement over the possible arrival of a stranger, that the absent man would have given his very life—blindly, as with regard to the treasure for which he had been so blindly and so often seeking—hitherto in vain.
Chapter Six.
Relapse.
The sun was at least four hours high when the stranger awoke.