Most men would have waxed indignant over her cool effrontery in putting things this way. This one, she knew, would do nothing of the sort. If anything, it rather amused him.
“Doing? Well, I began by nearly dying of fever. Would have quite, if Sybrandt hadn’t tumbled in by accident and pulled me through it.”
“Poor old Hilary!—What are you laughing at?”
“Nothing much. Something funny struck me, that’s all. But you were always deficient in a sense of the ridiculous, Hermia, so it’s not worth repeating. You wouldn’t see it. By-the-way, when I was lying ill, a squad of Matabele came around, under that swab Muntusi, and looted a little, and assegai-ed the two piccaninnies.”
“What? Tickey and Primrose? Oh, poor little beasts!”
“I couldn’t move a finger, of course—weak as a cat. In fact, I didn’t know what had happened till afterwards.”
Again the humour of the situation struck him irresistibly. The matter-of-course way in which she was asking and receiving the news just as though they had parted quite in ordinary fashion and merely temporarily, was funny. But it was Hermia all over.
“I’d become sick of it by that time,” he went on. “So I sold out everything, and came down country.”
“To think of your being at the Bayfields’ all this while, Hilary. And you didn’t know I was here?”
“Hadn’t the ghost of a notion. Of course I had heard you were here, but there was nothing to lead me to locate you as ‘Mrs Fenham.’ By the way, Hermia, what on earth made you strike out in the line of instructor of youth? No. It’s really too funny.”