He turned his head slowly and surveyed her by the increasing light of the moon. Then he pushed her inside and shut the door.
“We’ll take a mattress off one of the beds,” he said, “and sleep in front of the fire...”
The next day Lawless announced his intention of going into town in quest of a further supply of comforts. Tottie suggested accompanying him, but he negatived the idea.
“I want your mount for a pack-horse,” he said.
“That’s all very fine,” she grumbled. “What am I to do all day by myself? Think of the risk in a place like this... The white woman and the black man, you know.”
He laughed grimly.
“You have a revolver. I’d back you against any nigger that happened along.”
He rode away in the morning sunshine with the second horse on a lead. For the first mile the woman accompanied him, walking beside him with her hand on his stirrup. Once or twice she looked up at him as he sat, a straight soldierly figure, in the saddle, with the strong stern face shaded by the wide-brimmed hat, and the keen sombre eyes fixed steadily ahead, and in her own eyes shone the light of loyal affection and admiration which so often appeared in them when they rested on him unseen.
“Bring some sort of a newspaper back with you, Grit,” she begged. “It’ll help to keep up the fiction that we’re still in the world, somehow.”
Then she parted from him and started to walk back alone, and he put the horses at a canter and rode forward into the blue haze that shrouded and softened the scene. The morning air was delicately fresh and crisp with a touch of sharpness in it like the feel of an English spring. The African winter, with its warm sunshiny days and cold nights, is the most perfect season in a land that boasts one of the finest climates in the world. White man’s weather, it is called; and it sets the white man thinking pleasantly of the land he speaks of and thinks of as Home. It set Lawless thinking of Home as he rode across the veld,—of a gabled grey-walled house set down in a pretty garden that gave upon a lane. The lane in summer was gay with wild flowers and shaded by find old elms, and he had walked there often with the beautiful woman who had lived in the grey stone house, the woman who had professed to love him, and who had written to him later that she never wished to see him again.