“Of course I am sure,” he said indignantly.
“You see,” went on Bessie, poking at the sod wall with the stick she held in her hand, “perhaps in this place you might be putting an exaggerated value on me. You think I am pretty because you see nobody but Kafir and Boer women, and it would be the same with everything. I’m not fit to marry such a man as you,” she went on, with a sudden burst of distress; “I have never seen anything or anybody. I am nothing but an ignorant, half-educated farmer girl, with nothing to recommend me, and no fortune except my looks. You are different to me; you are a man of the world, and if ever you went back to England I should be a drag on you, and you would be ashamed of me and my colonial ways. If it had been Jess now, it would have been different, for she has more brains in her little finger than I have in my whole body.”
Somehow this mention of Jess jarred upon John’s nerves, and chilled him like a breath of cold wind on a hot day. He wanted to put Jess out of his mind just now.
“My dear Bessie,” he broke in, “why do you suppose such things? I can assure you that, if you appeared in a London drawing-room, you would put most of the women into the shade. Not that there is much chance of my frequenting London drawing-rooms again,” he added.
“Oh, yes! I may be good-looking; I don’t say that I am not; but can’t you understand, I do not want you to marry me just because I am a pretty woman, as the Kafirs marry their wives? If you marry me at all I want you to marry me because you care for me, the real me, not my eyes and my hair. Oh, I don’t know what to answer you! I don’t indeed!” and she began to cry softly.
“Bessie, dear Bessie!” said John, who was pretty well beside himself by this time, “just tell me honestly—do you care about me? I am not worth much, I know, but if you do all this goes for nothing,” and he took her hand and drew her towards him, so that she half slipped, half rose from the sod wall and stood face to face with him, for she was a tall woman, and they were very nearly of a height.
Twice she raised her beautiful eyes to his to answer and twice her courage failed her; then at last the truth broke from her almost with a cry:
“Oh, John, I love you with all my heart!”
And now it will be well to drop a veil over the rest of these proceedings, for there are some things that should be sacred, even from the pen of the historian, and the first transport of the love of a good woman is one of them.
Suffice it to say that they sat there side by side on the sod wall, and were happy as people ought to be under such circumstances, till the glory departed from the western sky and the world grew cold and pale, till the night came down and hid the mountains, and only the stars and they were left to look out across the dusky distances of the wilderness of plain.