“Where’s that?”
“The Sezelani. All sugar cane and coolies. Beastly hot, too. I’m jolly glad of this move.”
“Well I hope you’ll make up for it here. There’s a fair number of bushbuck in the kloofs—duiker and blekbok too, guinea fowl, and other small fry. So be sure and bring your gun over whenever you can and like.”
“Thanks awfully,” replied Elvesdon, thinking he would manage to do this pretty often.
They had reached the homestead. The house was a one-storeyed, bungalow-like building, with a thatched verandah running round three sides of it. It stood on a slope, and the ground in front fell away from a fenced-in bit of garden ground down a well-grown mealie land, whose tall stalks were loaded with ripening cobs. Then the wild bush veldt began. Black kloofs, dense with forest trees; bush-clad slopes, culminating in a great bronze-faced krantz frowning down in overhanging grandeur; here and there patches of open green as a relief to the profusion of multi-hued foliage—in truth in whatever direction the eye might turn, that which met it was indeed good to look at, as the stranger had said.
The said stranger, as they entered the house, was exercised by no small amount of curiosity. Of what did this household consist? he asked himself. The other members of the family, for instance, what were they like, he wondered? Like this girl—who had struck him as so unlike any other girl he had ever seen? Like her father—who in his own way seemed almost to stand unique? But beyond themselves there seemed to be nobody else in the house at all.
The room he was ushered into was cool and shaded. It was got up with innumerable knick-knacks. There were water-colour sketches on the walls—and framed photographic portraits placed about on easels. There was a piano, and other signs of feminine occupation. But nothing was overdone. The furniture was light and not overcrowded, thoroughly suitable to a hot climate. After the noontide glare outside, the room struck him as cool and restful to a degree—refined, too; in short a very perfect boudoir.
“Nice little room, isn’t it?” said his host rejoining him, for he had excused himself for a minute. “Yes, that portrait—that’s my eldest boy. Poor chap, he was killed in the Matabele rising in ’96. That other’s the second—I’ve only the two. He’s away at the Rand; making his fortune—as he thinks; fortunately he’s got none to lose.”
“What fine looking fellows,” said Elvesdon. “By Jove they are.”
The other smiled.