"It was a shame," she said to herself now, still smiling; "but really I don't often vex him!"
A man and a woman passed, as she sat smiling her subtle smile through her spraying hair, and looked at her with great curiosity.
Afterwards the man said excitedly:
"That girl takes the shine out of Mary——"
The woman, who looked well-bred with a casual distinguished manner, agreed with him, but did not tell him so. She said:
"Her eyes look as though they were painted in by Burne-Jones, and she is dressed like a Beardsley poster; but I think she is only a girl who is glad to be alive. Mary, however, is the most beautiful woman in Africa."
The girl heard the words "Burne-Jones eyes," and knew they were speaking of her.
At last she arrived at the gates of her destination. Big, green iron gates, that clanged behind her as she walked quickly forward down a winding path into a deep dim garden. There was no more to be seen but trees and tangles of flowering shrubs and bushes and stretches of green grass, and trees and trees and trees. Some of the trees were so tall and old that they must have been growing there when Vasco da Gama first found Natal; but there were mangoes and sweetly-smelling orange arbours, that could only have been planted a mere twenty or thirty years. The magnolia bushes were in bud, and clots of red and golden flowers were all aflare. Cacti, spreading wide prickly arms, and tall furzy grasses. Cool wet corners had grottos frondy with ferns; other corners were like small tropical jungles with enormous palms trailed and tangled over with heavy waxen-leaved creepers and strangely shaped flowers.
At last, deep in the heart of this wild, still garden, she found the house. A tall rose-walled house, its balconies and verandahs, too, all draped and veiled with clinging green. One lovely creeper that clothed the hall-porch was alive with flowers that were like scarlet stars.
She broke one of them off and stuck it in the bosom of her gown, where it glowed and burned all day.