Mrs Warner was inclined to take rather a more serious view of the affair, but for all that she agreed with her husband that it would be best to have their cousin home to stay with them; and so she was advised to come home as soon as she could, and forget all about her adventure at the Cape, in the pretty Warwickshire village. She was glad enough to accept their offer, for though she had become a heroine at the Cape, she found that heroines were rather at a discount as governesses, and that it was difficult to see what she could do with herself there. So two years from the day of her trial found Kate quite at home at the Rectory, and happy enough in her new life.
“The Watsons are going to bring a friend with them to tennis, I forget his name,” said Mr Warner to his wife one day at luncheon. “He seems rather a pleasant sort of man. I met him at Coventry the other day; he comes from the Diamond Fields, where he made some money. I wonder whether you ever met him out there, Kate?”
Kate looked troubled. It occurred to her that more people were likely to know a young lady who had stood in the dock in a criminal court than she knew; and in consequence she did not feel over comfortable at the idea of meeting any one who came from the Diamond Fields.
The others understood her embarrassment, though they tried to persuade her that there was no reason for her fears. “People who have known one another at the ends of the earth would never tell tales. I should say that rule would be kept for mutual convenience,” said Mr Warner, who, like many an untravelled Englishman, believed that the goings on of those living in distant lands were, as a rule, such as they would wish to keep dark at home. However, Kate showed so much apprehension of a meeting with a man who might remember the trial, that they did not dissuade her from keeping away and avoiding it. So it happened that in the afternoon she was sitting in a school-room by herself, waiting securely there until the visitors had gone away again. She had heard them arrive, and heard a voice in the hall which she knew must belong to the Watsons’ friend from the Cape, and it had seemed somehow to be familiar to her ear. She sat with a book before her, reading very little, and thinking a good deal of the events of two years before, which now seemed so far off—of the long journey across the veldt, of the scene at Jagger’s Drift, and then of her trial at Kimberley. What had become of the man for whom for some motive she could hardly fathom she had risked so much? Likely enough he was buried under the South African sand, or perhaps he was taken again, and was working out his sentence. Again his figure came back to her mind, dressed as he was when she last saw him, in coarse canvas shirt and trousers decorated with numerous broad arrows and other Government marks.
Just then she heard her aunt’s voice from the garden, shouting out to some one in the hall.
“Second door to the right, as you go in, you will find the rackets; no, left I mean.” Whoever was being spoken to did not hear the last words, for instead of going into the room where the rackets were kept, he opened the door of the room she was sitting in. It seemed to her as if her thoughts had taken bodily shape, for there stood the man she was thinking about. He seemed to her to be dressed as he had been when she had seen him last, for his flannel and soft hat had much the effect of his convict garb.
“At last I have found you, and I have been trying to find out where you were for the last year,” he said.
“I thought you were still looking for the rackets, and came to show you where they were kept. I need not introduce my cousin to you, as you seem to have made each other’s acquaintance,” said Mrs Warner, as she came into the room some ten minutes afterwards.
“Yes; we were old friends in South Africa,” answered Darrell.