“I don’t know.”
He fidgeted nervously with his collar and avoided her gaze. She was looking at him with a puzzled, questioning expression in her eyes, with no suspicion of his purpose in mentioning Paul’s name, but struck by the coincidence that Paul should be in his thoughts, even as he was in hers.
“It’s strange you should have said that,” she continued. “Lately I have been dreaming of Paul. I dream of him nearly every night.”
“Dream of him!” he echoed blankly. “Do you mean that you dream that he’s alive?”
“I dream that I see him looking at me,” she answered. “He looks into my eyes and turns away; and then I wake and lie in the darkness, trembling. The dream is always the same.”
“I say! that’s queer,” he said, staring at her, as earlier in the day he had stared at Hallam, as if he saw a ghost. These things were making him superstitious. “What should make you do that, I wonder?”
“Who can say? It’s a matter of nerves, I suppose.” She dropped the net she was holding and put a hand on his arm and drew him towards the door. “Come along down, old thing,” she said. “We are not good company for one another to-night. For your toothache, and my heartache, we must seek an anodyne in the society of the others.”
But for Bainbridge’s imaginary toothache there was no effective anodyne: the complexities of the situation were altogether beyond his efforts at elucidation. There was nothing for it but to stand by and wait for the blow to fall.
He sat on the stoep and talked with Lake, George’s brother-in-law, about the native labour unrest, and the advisability of adopting strong measures in quelling the agitation.
“This native question is going to be a big problem in the near future,” Lake opined. “We give the coloured man too much power.”