One of the prettiest bits in Siever’s Kloof was the very spot whereon Blachland had shot the large bushbuck ram, and here the two had taken up their position. For nearly an hour Lyn had been very busy, and her escort seated there, lazily smoking a pipe, would every now and then overlook her work, offering criticisms, and making suggestions, some of which were accepted, and some were not. Fred, unable to remain still for ten minutes at a time, was ranging afar with his air-gun—now put right again—and, indeed, with it he was a dead shot.
“I never can get the exact shine of these red krantzes,” Lyn was saying. “That one over there, with the sun just lighting it up now, I know I shall reproduce it either the colour of a brick wall or a dead smudge. The shine is what I want to get.”
“And you may get it, or you may not, probably the latter. There are two things, at any rate, which nobody has ever yet succeeded in reproducing with perfect accuracy, the colour of fire and golden hair—like yours. Yes, it’s a fact. They make it either straw colour or too red, but always dead. There’s no shine in it.”
Lyn laughed, lightheartedly, unthinkingly.
“True, O King! But I expect you’re talking heresy all the same. I wonder what that boy is up to?” she broke off, looking around.
“Why, he’s a mile or so away up the kloof by this time. Do you ever get tired of this sort of life, Lyn?”
“Tired? No. Why should I? Whenever I go away anywhere, after the first novelty has worn off, I always long to get back.”
“And how long a time does it take to compass that aspiration?”
“About a week. At the end of three I am desperately homesick, and long to get back here to old father, and throw away gloves and let my hands burn.”
Blachland looked at the hands in question—long-fingered, tapering, but smooth and delicate and refined—brown indeed with exposure to the air, but not in the least roughened. What an enigma she was, this girl. He watched, her as she sat there, sweet and cool and graceful as she plied her brushes, the wide brim of her straw hat turned up in front so as not to impede her view. Every movement was a picture, he told himself—the quick lifting of the eyelid as she looked at her subject, the delicate supple turn of the wrist as she worked in her colouring. And the surroundings set forth so perfectly the central figure—the varying shades of the trees and their dusky undergrowth, the great krantz opposite, fringed with trailers, bristling with spiky aloes lining up along its ledges. Bright spreuws flashed and piped, darting forth from its shining face; and other bird voices, the soft note of the hoepoe, and the cooing of doves kept the warm golden air pleasant with harmony.