The chief's daughter made a barely perceptible sign, but her attendants understood it, and remained where they stood.
"The success or failure of a hunt is a small thing. Such does not render a man heavy of countenance," he went on, when they were beyond earshot.
"What does, then?" said the girl, raising her large eyes swiftly to his.
"Sorrow—parting. Such are the things which make life dark. I have dwelt long among your people, and at the prospect of leaving them my heart is sore."
As the last words left his lips, Laurence learned in just one brief flash of a second exactly what he wanted to know. But the look of startled pain in Lindela's face gave way to one of surprise.
"Of leaving them?" she echoed. "Has the Great Great One, then, ordered you to begone, Nyonyoba?"
"Not yet. But it will be so. Listen! At the full of the second moon."
A cry escaped her. She understood. For a moment the self-control of her savage ancestors entirely forsook her. She became the child of nature—all human.
"It shall not be! It shall not be!"
The passion, the abandonment in the soft, liquid Zulu tone—in the large eyes, transforming the whole attractive face—touched even him—penetrated even the scaly armour which encased his hardened heart. Considerations of expediency no longer reigned there alone as he stood face to face with the chief's daughter. She was a magnificent specimen of womanhood, he decided, gazing with unfeigned admiration upon her splendid frame, upon the unconscious grace of her every movement.