"Because I don't like you—if you must have it."
Brookfield at once became calm; he prepared to argue out the matter.
"Karri," he began plaintively, "I want to tell you one thing. I like you and Charlie Bramham better than anyone in this rotten country, but there's no one who can annoy me more than you can——"
Carson yawned, got up, and walked out of the room.
CHAPTER VI
IT was a moonless night, but the stars were out in their legions, and the garden was full of a warm, silvery silence—the silence composed of the thousand tiny sounds and scents that make the charm and wonder of an African night. The moon-flowers were tolling their heavy, white bells, and some big flowering-bush, with pale, subtle blossoms, seemed to have all the fragrance of a beautiful woman's hair.
Poppy walked in the gracious dimness, her bare, pale feet picking their way delicately amongst bright things lying like fallen stars in the grass. A green, clinging plant, waving long tendrils, clutched at her gown as she passed, and she broke it off, and, twining it into a crown, put it on her hair. It had tiny flowers dotted amongst its leaves. The trees shut her in from all the world, and it was as though she walked in some great, dim, green well.
She had been all through the garden and was tired. At last she threw herself down and lay at full-length on the soft, short grass, in which there was no dampness, for a terrible pall of heat had lain all day upon Natal, and through the thin nainsook of her gown Poppy could feel the warmth still in the earth. She stared into the solemn velvet sky where Orion, in gleaming belt and sword, leaned above her, and the Milky Way was a high-road to Heaven, paved with powdered silver. Far away, in the town below, a church clock flung out eleven clear strokes upon the night air. Poppy turned on her side and lay with her cheek to the earth.
"Old Mother Africa! What have you hidden in your bosom for me?" she whispered.... "I believe that if I sleep on your breast to-night I will dream my destiny. I love you, and you love me.... I am your child ... a poppy growing in your old brown bosom. You are the only mother I have ever known.... Whatsoever you give unto me, I will take and say it is good. I feel predestined to-night.... If I lay my ear to you, will I hear the foot-falls of my fate approaching?... What is there for me? Fame? Love? Those are the only two things in the world! ... but no one can have them both it is said.... Which have you for me, Mother? Will you tell me in a dream?... I will sleep here to-night," she said at last; and shutting her eyes she lay still.