So, reluctantly, and with a final hug, the little one resigns herself to be carried off, en route for the land of Nod, and Claverton, relighting his pipe, rejoins his friend on the verandah, just as his wife approaches from the garden at the same moment.
Time has dealt very kindly with Lilian. The soft, serene beauty of that sweet face has not one whit abated its charm; and the attractiveness and winning grace of her manner is just the same as it was in the Lilian Strange of former days. Payne, as he responds to her greeting of cordial surprise, thinks that, lucky dog as his friend always was, the day he went to Seringa Vale was the very beginning of his real luck.
“Unexpected pleasure?” he answers. “Oh, yes, I like astonishing people. But this, as a surprise, don’t come near the day I picked up our friend, there, wandering about the veldt, and ran him in to Fountains Gap, just before the war. Eh?”
“Picked me up! Well, I like that,” is Claverton’s reply, cutting short the other’s satirical chuckle. “It strikes me, friend George, that if there was any ‘picking up’ in the case, you were the party who underwent the operation, and that considerably damaged by a Kafir knobkerrie, too.”
Payne, of course, was ready with a bantering rejoinder, and much chaff followed. A soft blush had come over Lilian’s face at the recollection. She stood for a moment, gazing at the purple peaks of the distant mountains, standing steely against the sky from which all the afterglow had now faded. Then, with a bright laugh, she turned to enter the house, saying:
“Well, I shall leave you to fight out the question between you.”
Reader, we will follow her example, even as we have followed her through her joys and sorrows. We must now part company with all our friends whose fortunes and reverses have entertained us throughout this narrative, but with none more reluctantly than with these two. Yet what better moment can we choose than this, when we leave them surrounded by every happiness the world can afford, here in their beautiful home, in that bright and sunny land which to them has been the scene of so many marvellous and stirring experiences?
The End.