But at last when the sounds of broad day were all about us and the room full of leaping sunshine, the fight was over, and I knew that my will had conquered. The victory, if so it could be called, was to me! For how long I knew not. I had learned much of my husband in those dawn hours of weeping and reviling and recriminations; and one thing I knew—this battle would be often to fight. Life with Maurice Stair, unless I was prepared to surrender my will to his, would be one long, ceaseless struggle—a struggle in which my adversary would disdain no weapon or device to bring me down.
Chapter Nineteen.
What a Goad Performed.
“A word fitly spoken is like apples of silver in baskets of gold.”
A few days after our marriage Maurice went into town, and came back to Water-lily Farm with a brief but interesting statement.
“We shall not be leaving Mashonaland. When I made you some such promise I had not reckoned with my dear uncle Alexander. It appears that he objects to my going away from Africa.”
I regarded him steadfastly for a while, trying to read between the lines of this announcement.
“What has made him change his mind about helping you into the Consular service, Maurice?” I asked, not without a shade of irony I must confess, for any one less adapted than Maurice to a profession in which high principles, tact, and good manners are essential qualifications it would have been hard to find, even in Africa, where budding diplomats do not grow on every bush.