Again the feeling of terror and panic swept over the child's heart; but she was very tired. She believed she was already dead. Her head fell back.
"My soul is like a shrivelled leaf," is what she answered.
PART II
"I never saw anything like the way a poppy lives with its heart and soul every second of the day.
"It is the most joyful flower in the world. Not a joy of strength, for it is fragile, but just sheer delight in existence and devil-may-care. I would much rather have poppies on my coffin than stupid affected lilies and white roses.
"Then the sheer cheek of a poppy, and the way it dies quickly, without any bother, when picked! It is such a definite vivid thing, whether it is braving the sun, or sleeping folded under the stars. A wild, fresh individuality; not a banal neutral-tinted affair out of the garden, or something with a smile on its face and a claw underneath, like a rose."
(Extract from a letter.)
CHAPTER I
THE girl, with a little curling motion, leaned back in the rickshaw and gazed with fascinated eyes at the moving picture before her, seen through the hazy heat of a summer day.
Above the wide main street of Durban the sun blazed and glared like a brazen image of itself in the high ardent blue. Men in loose white ducks and flannels sauntered along, or stood smoking and talking under the shop awnings.
Carriages and rickshaws flew past, containing women in light gowns and big veils, with white and sometimes scarlet sunshades. Black boys at the street corners held out long-stalked roses and sprays of fragrant mimosa to the passers-by, beguiling them to buy. Coolies with baskets of fish on their heads and bunches of bananas across their shoulders, shambled along, white-clad and thin-legged. One, with a basket of freshly-caught fish on his arm, cried in a nasal sing-song voice: