Mrs. Lewin thrust a last fierce hatpin into her Panama, and put up her hand to settle the hairpins at her neck. It was four o’clock, and they were due at the rendezvous at half-past, for this was a late picnic which began in the afternoon and ran on into nightfall. Such excursions can be planned for two periods of the day—early morning, or when the sun is losing its power, but between those hours lies the Miroro, when no white man may work or play. A morning picnic sets out before seven, breakfasts up on the hills, and buries itself in the heart of the woods during the day’s heat, emerging again at four for the return to dinner and iced drinks; but it means a long strain on the endurance of the guests’ attraction for each other, and the Gilderoys were wise in their generation and chose the shorter method.
At the foot of Maitso the Lewins fell in with Halton on his way from Government House, and Brissy Nugent hot from a canter from Mitsinjovy, where he had been lunching. The four ponies turned sturdily to the ascent, and Mrs. Lewin looked at the streaked flanks of Ally’s mount, and thanked Heaven for the blanket under her saddle, for Liscarton’s wet sides did not agree with her frills. There had been, to her secret amusement, a brief struggle between Halton and Nugent as to who should ride beside her, and the soldier’s more brazen tactics had won the coveted place. Brissy was not thin-skinned, and that Halton shrugged his shoulders mentally, and classified him as still an unlicked cub, did not trouble him so much as it would have done to be proved the weaker man.
Mrs. Lewin laughed silently, and as usual found reason for enjoyment in her immediate present. Afterwards it seemed as if every detail of that day were cruelly impressed on her memory, and she never could forget one. Even the garrison jokes that Brissy told her in doubtful taste, and at which she had learned the futility of frowning, remained in her mind long after things she would fain have kept had drifted from her. She could remember the very smell from the vegetation which had overgrown the road during the recent rain, and turning in her saddle to look down and see the satin blue bay and the roofs of the crazy little town, whose zinc shone like a glare of silver in the sunshine. Beyond Mitsinjovy the Left Gate stood out like a vast sentinel, shutting out the sea and the horizon, but from Maitso Hill they could only see the cone of the Right Gate rising over their own position. Below them in the harbour the great walls of coal looked nothing but toy-mounds and black lines, and the mass of shipping was but a detail in the picture.
Often as she had seen that view Mrs. Lewin was vaguely conscious of seeing it afresh that day, and the row of ravenalas outside the Churtons’ quarters, too, struck her as they never had before, while there seemed a new suggestion that she could not grasp in the two mounted figures themselves, waiting motionless in the logwood shade. Diana was at her best in the saddle, but the Major, who could have ridden down any man present, looked too large for a Key Island pony. Even at the moment Leoline Lewin wondered that she noticed these things, and seemed possessed of a novel alertness, a keener sense of observation than ever before, as though her mental life had quickened. She always thought of the Gilderoys’ picnic as the last occasion on which she wore muslin appropriately. She liked to be in sympathy with her gowns, and she never again felt the adequate frivolity for the dainty frills she laid aside that night. Life seemed to have gone too deep for muslins from that time forth—a foolish fancy, but one that made the successful little frock something of a relic.
“How are you, Chum? The Gilderoys are waiting at the top of the hill,” Diana called out strongly. “Half the Station is up there already. Wait a minute—here comes the Denver girl and Gurney.”
Mrs. Lewin looked at Major Churton, and sat still.
“An invitation with R. S. V. P. in the corner,” said the Major succinctly to himself, and went straight to his goal in characteristic fashion. “Do I ride with you, Mrs. Lewin?”
“I will trust you to go first!” said Chum gaily. “There will be no riding with any one if I know the path we are taking. The ponies slide down on their tails the other side of Maitso, for I am sure we are going over the Pass and towards Rano.”
“The Gilderoys are fools if they do,” he said, as they fell into the procession side by side. “Do you know what Rano means, by the way?”
“I am not quite ignorant, Major! It means water in Malagasy, and is given to that range of hills because of the many springs there—have I learned my geography lesson rightly? How lovely the Rano Falls are, by the way! We rode out there just before the rains.”