“Heard anything of Renshaw?” said Christopher Selwood, coming in hot and tired from his work, for a cup of tea late in the afternoon.
“Not a word,” answered his wife, looking up from the last of a batch of letters that had just come in with the weekly post. “Why—you don’t think—?” she began, alarmed at the grave look which had come over her husband’s face.
“Well, I don’t know,” he replied. “I hope there’s nothing seriously wrong. How long is it since you wrote?”
“More than a fortnight now.”
“Ah, well. I dare say it’s all right. Now I think of it, they’ve had big rains up that end of the country. Big rains mean big floods, and big floods mean all the drifts impassable. The post carts may have been delayed for days.”
“You think that’s it?” she said anxiously.
“Why, yes. At first, I own, I felt a bit of a scare. You see, the poor chap was desperately ill when he wrote—though, to be sure, he must have got over the worst even then—and I’ve been feeling a little anxious about him of late. Well, he’ll come when he can, and bring his friend with him, I hope. It’ll liven the girls up, too. Miss Avory must be getting properly tired of having no one to flirt with.”
The soft afternoon air floated in through the open windows in balmy puffs, bringing with it a scent of flowers, of delicate jessamine twined round the pillars of the stoep, of rich roses now bursting into full bloom. A long-waisted hornet rocketed to and fro just beneath the ceiling, knocking his apparently idiotic head against the same, and the twittering of finks darting in and out of their pendulous nests above the dam in all their habitual fussiness, mingled with the melodious whistle of spreuws holding contraband revel among the fast-ripening figs in the garden.
For a few minutes Mrs Selwood plied her sewing-machine in silence, then—
“Talking of Violet, Chris, did it never occur to you that she had flung her net over poor Renshaw?”