Brute! was what her sick heart cried, though her lips made no sound. There was a silence. He leaned on his elbows, smiling his slow evil smile at her, and she sat perfectly still looking through her fingers at the fire and the forms of the two umfans beside it, rolled in their blankets and already sleeping. No use calling to them, she knew, and the other boys were away with the oxen. In any case, all were too much under the dominion of Roper to stand by her. She realised that she was in deadly danger—and alone. For the first time in the last two years of proud and bitter defiance, she felt the need of some stronger spirit than her own, and in her extremity her heart turned to God with a silent cry for help.
“I forgot to tell you,” said Roper softly, “that her name was Carlton, too. Isn’t that a funny thing now!”
“I don’t think so,” she found courage to say, though her eyes were the eyes of a hunted thing.
“No? Now I thought it the funniest thing I ever heard,” said he laughing softly, “and ever since, I have been saying to myself, ‘What a pity it wasn’t the young lady I found!’ It would be so pleasant on an evening like this for instance, to have the society of a nice young lady! So very pleasant,” he repeated, and leaned on the table looking into her eyes with some horrible meaning. “Quite alone on the veld, with no one to know or care what we did—no one to—interfere—all alone with love and the daisies.” With a swift movement he caught hold of the girl’s hand which was lying on the table. But the next instant he had loosed it and was on his feet.
“Who the devil—”
A man had come into the camp. Swift-footed and noiseless as a ghost, neither the dog nor the sleeping umfans had heard his coming. It was almost as if he had sprung from a neighbouring bush and Vivienne, startled as Roper by the sudden apparition, rose to her feet. But apart from his quietness, and the gleam of his light clothes, there was nothing supernatural about the tall lithe shirt-sleeved figure which with rifle on shoulder and revolver on hip, came into the firelight. Nothing supernatural either, but something indescribably soothing to the nerves of Vivienne Carlton in the sound of that cheerful, careless voice.
“Ah, gentlemen! Hope I did not startle you? I’m delighted to come upon your camp, having mislaid my own by a few miles. I shall be glad to spend the night here if you have no objection?”
Roper turned his back and with a sullen scowling face sat down again, muttering some words that sounded anything but inviting. The stranger took no offence. He also sat down opposite the girl, and began to relate how he had left his boys and gone after a buck and got too far away to bother to return that night—and all the time he was looking steadily across the packing-case at Vivienne and she saw that he recognised her, even as she recognised him as soon as she saw his light grey eyes. It was the silent, tanned man who had left the coach at Palapye.