The men were waiting for her in the lounge; Sarle looking radiantly happy because he was sure of the society of the two people he cared for most in the world; Kenna with a fresh device to try her composure.
"I want to see if you can remember the ingredients of that cocktail I introduced to you at the 'Carlton' on a certain memorable evening when we escaped from Aunt Grizel," he said gaily. She looked at him reflectively. "As I've just been telling Sarle, you learned the recipe by heart, and swore that from henceforth you would use no other."
"Ah, yes," she drawled slowly. "But you take no account of time and my 'Winter-garment of Repentance.' I am a very different girl to the one you knew two years ago."
"I realize that, of course." He grinned with delight at her point. It seemed to him possible that the evening might be even more entertaining than the afternoon.
"This girl never drinks cocktails," she finished quaintly, and he liked her more and more.
Many glances followed them as they passed down the long room, full of rose-shaded candles and the heavy scent of flowers. Pretty women are not scarce in Cape Town, especially at the season when all Johannesburg crowds to the sea, but there was a haunting, almost tragic loveliness about April that night that set her apart from the other women, and drew every eye. Sarle felt his pulses thrill with the pride that stirs every man when the seal of public admiration is set upon the woman he loves. As he looked at her across the table he suddenly recalled some little verses he had found scrawled in Kenna's writing on an old book once when they were away together on the veld:
My love she is a lady fair,
A lady fair and fine;
She is to eat the rarest meat
And drink the reddest wine.
Her jewelled foot shall tread the ground
Like a feather on the air;
Oh! and brighter than the sunset
The frocks my love shall wear!
If she be loyal men shall know
What beauty gilds my pride;
If she be false the more glad I,
For the world is always wide.
Poor Kenna! She had been false: that was why he had sought the wide world of the veld and renounced women. Sarle, certain of the innate truth and loyalty of the girl opposite him as of her pearl-like outer beauty, could pity his friend's fate from the bottom of his soul. But being a man, he did not linger too long with pity; hope is always a pleasanter companion, and hope was burning in him like a blue flame: the hope that within an hour or two he would hold this radiant girl in his arms and touch her lips. He thought of the garden outside, full of shadows and scented starlight, and looking at the curve of her lips, his eyes darkened, and strange bells rang in his ears. She had eluded him for many nights, although she knew he loved her. He had kissed her fingers and the palm of her hand, but tonight out in the starlit garden he meant to kiss her lips. The resolve was iron in him. He hardly heard what the other two were saying. He was living in a world of his own. April, weary of Kenna's cruel heckling, turned to him for a moment's relief, and what she saw in his eyes was wine and oil for her weariness, but it made her afraid, not only because of the perilous longing in her to give him all he asked, but because Kenna sat alert as a lynx for even a smile she might cast that way. It was very certain that no opportunity would be given them for being a moment together; and divining something of Sarle's resolute temper, she could not help miserably wondering what would happen when it came to a tussle of will between the two men.