With a great shout of laughter that rang across the veld like a bell, he fell back upon his pillows. There was a terrible gurgling sound in his throat, and all was still.
One long look at the dead face, then Chrissie ran down the steps and sprang across the veld. Men’s forms were moving hither and thither, carrying the dead and wounded away from the raging flames. Groans resounded everywhere, and there were bitter cries for water. To one such cry, in a voice she knew, Chrissie flew like an arrow from a bow.
She found him lying where the explosion had thrown him, far down the river bank, shattered, broken, dying; and when she had given him water, she kissed his lips, and baring her breast let his head lie there, sobbing out his life’s blood against her heart.
Chapter Eight.
The Promise of Life.
“I have been trying to meet you ever since I came to Durban,” said the boy, in a voice that all the world might hear, so young it was and eager.
There was a stir among that portion of the world present in Mrs Carr-Ellison’s drawing-room. The man playing beautiful, desultory modulations on the grand piano struck a passionate chord and quivered off into the treble softly so that he might hear the woman’s answer; several scandalised skirts shivered and seemed to whisper, but the woman on the high-backed, gold satin sofa, did not disturb herself. She sat unsmiling, her head resting against the back of the sofa, her arms stretched wide on either side of her.
She had the despairing, unlighted eyes that tell of a soul’s light gone out, and her mouth drooped bitterly at the corners; but her hair was very beautifully arranged, and her pale gown with its gloomy sleeves and silvery bands must have taken some weeks to design.