No, not even in thought would he dwell again upon what followed. It was a weakness he had fought down. A weakness that even now, given rein, could unman him. The quick light vanished from his eyes, the mouth grew stern again, and he turned to descend.
At the same moment Meryl turned also and came towards his hiding-place. He had just time to step further back and take shelter behind a low, bushy tree, which would hardly reveal his khaki, before she passed. And just in front of him she raised her head and glanced upwards, so that he saw her eyes, and for a moment his pulses seemed to stop beating. If her pose had reminded him of someone it was as nothing compared to her face with that upward glance. The delicate contour, the fine features, the wistful, dreamy, quiet eyes. Were they blue, or were they grey?... How came they with long, dark, curling lashes when her hair was a dusky, light shade, with soft waves and gleams of sunlight? In his hiding-place he stood very still and very rigid. For a moment he might have been part of the rock behind him. Then she passed on up the steep ascent, and he came out and retraced his steps, feeling a little dazed.
Who could she be?... But, of course, the party must have arrived unexpectedly: had not remained in Edwardstown as they intended. And she was one of the heiresses—one of the flaunting, gaping, vulgar, dressed-up young women he had been secretly so resentful over. And, of course, she was none of these. Then suddenly he almost laughed; almost laughed aloud. For she was worse—far, far worse. The gushing, loud-voiced heiress he might have coped with. His frigidity froze most people if he chose; and avoidance was not difficult. But what could he do with Joan—his love, his dead love Joan—looking at him out of this girl's beautiful eyes, touching him with this girl's slender hands, speaking to him from this stranger's lips? It was impossible—impossible; all the careful training of that fifteen years in exile would be undone. His very life would be undermined again. For the moment it seemed incredible, preposterous. He felt stunned by it.
Then his rigid self-control came to his aid, and his face grew stern and hard.
The preposterous thing was that he should let a chance resemblance hit him so; should even admit the possibility of being undone after all his careful self-training. No, a thousand times no; he was not such a weak fool as that. The strength he had won was his still. He had only to go on being resolute and cold and the past would lie down again, and once more go quietly to sleep.
He defied it to overcome him now. By every agonised pang, by every hour of unfathomable bitterness, by every solitary year of self-chosen exile, he insisted that he must prevail. He strode on, scarcely seeing anything about him, and his face grew sterner and sterner. Then he came within sight of the camping-place, and saw the white tent, and Stanley giving directions, while Moore and some black boys unpacked things from the ambulance.
And he thought he would get more complete control of himself before he joined them; take this thing fairly by the throat and throttle it, that he might regain his peace of mind absolutely before the second encounter with the owner of the face and form that seemed for a moment to have made an upheaval in his life. So he turned aside and made for the temple, feeling glad and relieved at the consciousness that the mood was passing, and reassured that, being no more taken by surprise, he would successfully master it. Probably he could still go away on the morrow, and once away, Rhodesia would take him to her heart again. He knew it full well. Every day now the country was giving back to him of what he had given to her; lulling him, soothing him, revivifying him with her freshness and her charm.
But his mind was very occupied still and his vision clouded as he passed into the cool shade of the temple, and he did not see a small, dainty person with an impish face perched high on a broken wall, with her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands, and a queer, fitful, half-serious, half-bored expression in her dark eyes. Instead, seeing no one and thinking himself alone, he sat down on a low wall quite near to her and stared gloomily at the ground. Diana, not a little amused, surveyed him at her leisure. "What in the world," she wondered, "was this smart, soldierly looking man, correctly booted and spurred, sitting down there for in the ruins?..."
The great temple at Zimbabwe has never been roofed. The ruins consist of a wonderful outer wall, from twenty-two to thirty-two feet high and in some places fifteen feet thick, of an elongated shape, and within this wall are remnants of other walls which formed separate small enclosures. There is also the sacred enclosure with the conical tower, and leading into it from the north entrance the wonderfully contrived passage, between two high walls, scarcely more than a shoulder's breadth apart in one place. Amid the ruins trees have grown up, many of them higher than the outer wall, and these shade the glare of the sun, casting cool shadows and networks of sunlight upon the broken walls. And on the afternoon in question here and there were splashes of brilliant scarlet, where a Kaffir Boom tree flowered with a flaunting indifference to the passing of centuries and races.
Diana, with her whimsical, artistic temperament, was fully alive to the fascination and uniqueness of her surroundings, but being a little tired with the drive, she felt for the moment somewhat impatient with ruins generally, and just a shade depressed with a certain air of dead forlornness that hovered all around. Then into the midst of this dream of antiquity strode a stern, fierce-looking, very up-to-date sportsman, who sat, for no conceivable reason, on a broken wall and stared at the ground. For one moment her sense of the ludicrous made her almost laugh aloud. Then, with sudden, upleaping interest, she sat still as a mouse and watched him. Once she half smiled to herself. There was a man, then, as well as a boy! She was not going to be entirely stifled in ruins, after all! She went on with her cogitations, staring hard, her head a little to one side. A real man, too, with a lean, brown face, and a square, determined chin, and a nose quite Roman enough to suit any novelist, and dark hair a little thin on the top and a little grey at the temples. She could not be sure if he were a soldier or not, but evidently he had been riding, for he still carried a hunting-crop; and also, judging by his face and attitude, something was considerably on his mind.