She gave him a curiously cutting glance, but spoke nothing. As the sound of voices told of the approach of the other men, he walked to his place without further remark, and had already taken his seat when Mrs. van Cannan, followed by Saxby, entered. They were talking about Saxby's wife, and Mrs. van Cannan looked infinitely distressed.
"I am so sorry. I will go and sit with her this afternoon and see if I can cheer her up," she said.
"It will be very kind of you," said Saxby gratefully. "I have never known her so low."
"It must be the weather. We are all feeling the heat terribly. If only the rains would break."
"They are not far off," said Andrew McNeil cheerfully. "I prophesy that tonight every kloof will be roaring full, and tomorrow will see the river in flood."
"In that case, the mail had better go off this evening at six," said Mrs. van Cannan. "It may be held up for days otherwise. I hope everyone has their letters ready? Have you, Miss Chaine?"
"I have one or two still to write, but I can get through them quickly this afternoon."
Christine avoided looking directly at her. She felt that the woman must see the contempt in her eyes. It was hard to say which she detested more of the two sitting there so serenely cheerful—the faithless wife and mother, or the man who ate another man's salt and betrayed him in his absence. It made her feel sick and soiled to be in such company, to come into contact with such creeping, soft-footed, whispering treachery. She ached to get away from it all and wipe the whole episode from her mind. Yet how could she leave the children, leave Roddy, desert the father's trust? She knew she could not. But very urgently she wrote after lunch to Mr. van Cannan, begging him to return to the farm as soon as his health permitted and release her from her engagement. She expressed it as diplomatically as she was able, making private affairs her reason for the change; but she could not and would not conceal the fervency of her request.
There was a brooding silence in the room where she sat writing and thinking. Roddy, for once, tired out from the night before, slept under his mosquito-net, side by side with the little girls, and Christine, looking at his beautiful, classical face and sensitive mouth, wondered how she would ever be able to carry out her plan to leave the farm. Who would understand him as she did, and protect him? Even the father who loved him had not known of the secret, fantastic danger of the dam. And the woman who should have destroyed the fantasy had encouraged it! But God knew what was in the heart of that strange woman; Christine Chaine did not—nor wished to. All she wished was that she might never see her again. As for Saltire, her proud resolve was to blot him from her memory, to forget that he had ever occupied her heart for a moment. But—O God, how it hurt, that empty, desecrated heart! How it haunted her, the face she had thought so beautiful, with its air of strength and chivalry, that now she knew to be a mockery and a lie!
She sat in the shuttered gloom, with her hands pressed to her temples, and bitter tears that could no longer be held back sped down her cheeks. In all the dark hours since she had stolen back to the nursery, overwhelmed by the discovery of a hateful secret, she had not wept. Her spirit had lain like a stricken thing in the ashes of humiliation, and her heart had stayed crushed and dead. "Cold as a stone in a valley lone." Now it was wakened to pain once more by the scent of three yellow roses carefully placed by Roddy in a jug on the table. The scent of those flowers told her that she must go wounded all her life. She could "never again be friends with roses." He had even spoiled those for her. How dared he? Oh, how dared he come to her with gifts of flowers in his hands straight from a guilty intrigue with another man's wife?