He rose promptly, and a general move followed. When he was on his feet Cornelius delivered himself of the weighty reflections which had kept him silent during the recent discussion.
“The railway is very well; but it should make full compensation for all loss. The railway is controlled by the government; the government is controlled by the capitalists. That is not good, no!”
“The landowner is something of a capitalist himself,” Herman Nel put in drily.
His brother bent on him a look of heavy displeasure.
“The landowner in the future will represent the power of this country,” he said, and closed the argument by lighting his pipe.
Every one accompanied the visitors outside, and watched them mount and ride away. Herman Nel assisted Honor to the saddle, and while he remained with his hand on the rein he looked up at her and said quietly:
“Carry my love to Freidja.”
He did not seem to expect an answer, for he stepped back as he spoke; and Honor made no response, only when the other adieux were spoken and the horses started, she looked back at the man standing apart from the rest and smiled at him as she rode away.
For a while Matheson and his companion rode in unbroken silence. He was busy with the thoughts which Herman Nel’s disclosure had set fermenting in his brain. The course he would follow was plain. But it was not easy after the Kriges’ courtesy to leave them summarily; it was not possible, he felt, to do so and refuse to carry Krige’s message without causing offence. The risk had to be taken however. He could no longer lend himself to the furtherance of a matter which he now admitted freely he had not approved of from the first. He ought never to have allowed himself to be mixed up in the affair. It was not easy to draw back; it was less easy to rid himself of the influences which, spreading over three weeks of intimate daily life with Honor—for it was always in Honor his thoughts centred—affected him powerfully, changing all his view of things, altering his entire perspective. It was amazing what a grip this girl had succeeded in getting on his imagination. Try how he would he could not shake his thoughts clear of her. Abruptly he glanced in her direction. She rode with the reins loose on the horse’s neck; her face, which was partly averted, wore an air of abstraction, the eyes fixed with unfocussed vision upon the distance. She too seemed to have much to occupy her thoughts.
“I say!” he said, and broke off suddenly, not knowing after all what he intended saying.