Kate Meredith, Financier

by Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

"Ugh," said Kate, "it is very flattering to have Trouble's kind approval, but I do wish there was not such a local popularity for the methods of—what shall I say?"

"Primitive man. They rather grow on one. Perhaps I'm prejudiced in their favor, though. Even when I was at school I always preferred a licking to an imposition. By the way, you never showed me the butterflies you've collected here since you took them out of splints and pinned them in their case."

"Then come at once and admire," said Kate, and the pair of them left the veranda and went into the factory's living room.

Laura Slade looked after them wistfully. There was something between these two that she could not fathom, and vaguely feared. At Smooth River, and on the M'poso, their talk had been on the chilliest details of business, and only the most bare civilities passed beyond. It had seemed to her then that at any moment a word might bring a permanent rupture, and she had pleaded with each to accept the other in a more reasonable spirit. She was engaged to Carter; he kept reminding her of the tie in twenty different ways each day. She had lived under the ægis of the O'Neill and Craven firm all her life, and exaggerated its importance, and she begged Carter not to throw away what was his livelihood now and what would be hers when she married him.

Kate, too, was her friend, and together they had been the closest of confidants. She had known the secret of the firm's "Mr. K. O'Neill" almost as long as old Crewdson had known it, and she had kept that secret loyally in spite of the keenest temptation.

"Kate, I even kept it from George," she had said, and Kate had replied, "George being Mr. Carter, I suppose?"

Up to the time that they left the M'poso, it seemed hopeless to bring them even into the most stiff agreement. And then the first morning she woke up at Mokki, there was Kate in a Madeira chair on the veranda, with George Carter sitting on the rail beside her, and the pair of them were laughing and chatting as easily as though they had known one another a year.

She had never got what she thought any satisfactory explanation of how this relief of the tension had been brought about. She asked Carter, and he said he had arrived at the conclusion he had "merely been a rude ass," and it was time to be ashamed of himself and try ordinary human civility. She had attempted to sound Kate, and was merely congratulated on being engaged to a really nice man. And thereafter she had watched an intimacy grow between them, in which somehow or other, in spite of their obviously labored efforts to include her, she had no part.

She turned away from the door now, and sat down in one of the veranda chairs which the thrifty German had made for himself out of a palm-oil puncheon. Behind her the white man and the white woman talked butterflies. Before her was Africa, and night. No moon had risen, a few of the stars were lit. Fireflies blinked in and out at unexpected places in the velvety blackness, uncannily vanishing when their spasm of light was over. The night breeze sang gently through the trees and gave sharpness to the air, and the drone of insects kept to one low insistent note like the distant murmur of the river. The factory boys, tired with their merciless work, slept. But from the bush beyond the clearing there came ever and again a groan, or a roar, or a shriek, as often as not dimmed to a mere murmur by distance, to keep her aware of the axiom that Africa never sleeps and always carries pain.

The land breeze blew strong and her dress was thin. She shivered a little and called for Carter, as he had taught her, to bring a wrap. He came running out with it at once and covered her shoulders, as she was pleased to think, tenderly. He even stopped and talked to her for a minute or so. Then he said he must go and see Miss Head's last case, and once more went into the living room. She strained her ears to listen, and she heard the butterfly talk begin again where it had broken off.