Charlie looked rather uncomfortable, and began to tell some story of a party who were going to start and would not wait, when Connie interrupted him.
“If I thought you had had no better reason than that I should forgive you; as it is, I don’t think I shall unless you tell me something I want to know. You remember the day of the accident;” and a tear came into her eyes as the terrible memory of her father’s death came back to her. “Well, you remember on that day we were talking together under the trees, you and I: you were just going to tell me something when I was called away. Can you remember now what it was you were going to say?”
Of course he could remember, and once for all the heroic resolutions he had made and tried to act upon utterly broke down.
“I suppose I must tell my cousins about this,” Connie said, after they had talked for some time, as she glanced in the direction of the gentleman and lady she was travelling with, who were regarding them with looks of surprise and disapproval. “They are my guardians, and perhaps they mayn’t like it; but they know I always have my own way, and I think you might have known that too.”
She was right, they didn’t like it; but she in the end had her own way, and some twelve months after their meeting a digger of Red Shirt, who was reading a tattered English newspaper at the canteen, came across an advertisement of the marriage of Charles, son of the late Charles Langdale, of the Griqualand West Civil Service, to Constance, daughter of the late John Stanley (late Captain —th Light Infantry), which after much debate was interpreted to mean that Charlie had married the old General’s daughter after all.
Story 8.
A Duel at “Poker.”
Nobody on the Diamond Fields quite knew the beginning of the ill-feeling between Dr Gorman and Mr Bowker.