“Father, what have you done? You’ve given away Ratels—yes, given him away. And you’ve often said you wouldn’t part with him for five times his real value.”
“Yes. But I’ve never said I wouldn’t part with him for fifty thousand times—for fifty million times his real value.”
He dropped a hand upon her shoulder—that was all—then turned abruptly and went inside. The girl standing there alone gazed forth upon the tossing splendours of the sunlit wilderness, but actually seeing nothing of them, for her eyes were dim and moist. A struggle was going on within her. Then the lips, which had begun to tremble, hardened into firm compression. The struggle was over—unfortunately.
Chapter Three.
The Stranger from Zululand.
At the time we make his acquaintance Michael Thornhill did not take his stock-farming seriously, but rather as a pastime. This he could afford to do, as from one source or another he had enough to last him comfortably for the rest of his life, and also to start his remaining son in anything sound and likely to bear good results.
His operations, then, in that line just paid their way, but very little more—a result in nowise due to any lack of capacity on his part, for he had gone through the mill himself in earlier life and was as thoroughly at home in all pertaining to stock-raising as the most strenuous and practical farmers in the colony. But he had a hobby, and it was a good one, and that was—literature.
Not the manufacture of it—oh no—or we might have felt bound to withhold the qualifying adjective. The absorption of it—ancient and modern—was his craze and his delight. He never had found time to indulge this during a hard-worked and hardening life, but had always looked forward to a good time coming when he should be able to do so. Now it had come.