"Druro," he supplied, smiling too, "and this is Rhodesia. I'm afraid you can't miss meeting me again—if you try."
He, too, as she very well observed, was good to behold, standing there with the light on his handsome head. She did not miss the potency of his smile. Nor, being a woman who dealt in lights and shades herself, was the flattering significance of his words wasted upon her.
"Tant meiux!" she said, and, in case he was no French scholar, repeated it in English, as she held out her slim gloved hand—"All the better!"
Gay and a man she had been dancing with came out and passed them as they stood there smiling and touching hands—a handsome, debonair man and a subtly beautiful woman. Gay took the picture of them home with her, and stayed long thinking of it when she should have been sleeping. Long she leaned from her bedroom window, gazing at the great grey spaces of veld that she loved so much, but seeing them not. All she could see was Druro's face turned cold, the rocklike expression of his eyes when he stared at her as though she had been some stranger—she, who had loved him for years, ever since, as a girl of sixteen, straight from England and from school, she first saw him and found in his clear, careless face and fearless ways the crystallization of all her girlish dreams. Lovely and spirited, decked in the bloom of youth, she had more, perhaps, than her fair share of admirers and adorers. Every man who met her fell, to some extent, in love with her. "Gay fever" it was called; and they all went through it, and some recovered and some did not. But Gay's fever was for Lundi Druro, though she hid it well behind locked lips and a sweet, serene gaze. She could not see him riding down the street, or standing among a group of his fellows (for other men always clustered about Druro), or even catch a glimpse of his big red Argyle car standing outside a building, without a tingling of all the life in her veins.
But she was neither blind nor a fool. Her spirit brooded over Druro with the half-mystical and half-maternal love that all true women accord to the beloved; but she knew very well that he had never looked her way and that the chances were he never might. He was a man's man. He liked women, and his eyes always lit up when he saw one, but he forgot all about them when they were not there, forgot them easily in cards and conviviality and the society of other men. Once, when someone had attacked him about his indifference to women, he had answered:
"Why, I adore women! But I prefer the society of men—there are fewer regrets afterward."
There was no doubt that he exercised a tremendous personal magnetism upon other men—attracted them, amused them, and influenced them, even obsessed them. The way he could make them do things just out of sheer liking for him almost amounted to mesmerism. It must be added that, though they were often unpractical, crazy, unwise, even dangerous things he influenced others to do, they were never shameful or in any way shady. There wasn't a shameful instinct or thought in the whole of Lundi Druro's composition. Gay, however, divined in him that his power of obsessing the minds of other men had become, or was on the way of becoming, a temptation and obsession to himself. She was wise enough to realize that hardly any man in the world can stand too much popularity, also to see the rocks ahead for Druro in a country where men drink and gamble far too much, and are fast in the clutches of these vices before they realize them as bad habits. It was not for nothing that she was Derek Liscannon's daughter and Derry Liscannon's sister.
She had her worries and anxieties, poor Gay, though she carried them with a stiff lip and never let the world guess how often her heart was aching behind her smile. But, of late, the worst of them had come to be in the fear that Lundi Druro was going the way so many good men go in Rhodesia—full-tilt for the rocks of moral and physical ruin.
This was the reason for her attack on him. She had long meditated something of the kind, though quite certain that he would take it badly. But she had thought that his friendship with her family and herself warranted (she knew that her love did) her doing a thing from which her soul shrank but did not retreat—hurting another human soul so as to help it to its own healing. And it had all ended in disappointment and despair. Nothing to show for it but the picture of him standing happy and gay, his eyes admiringly fixed on another woman! Perhaps the beautiful stranger would solace him for the wound Gay's hand had dealt? Who could she be? the girl wondered miserably.
But, by the next afternoon, everyone in Wankelo knew that Mrs. Hading, beautiful, unattached, and travelling for her pleasure, was staying at the "Falcon"; and Beryl Hallett, who was also staying there, had already met her and prepared a complete synopsis of her character, clothes, and manners (not to mention features, complexion, and hair) for the benefit of her friend, Gay Liscannon.