She took his hand and answered, almost angrily, “Why have you come? Why did you leave Bessie and my uncle?”
“I came because I was sent, also because I wished it. I wanted to bring you back home before Pretoria was besieged.”
“You must have been mad! How could you expect to get back? We shall both be shut up here together now.”
“So it appears. Well, things might be worse,” he added cheerfully.
“I do not think that anything could be worse,” she answered with a stamp of her foot, then, quite thrown off her balance, she burst incontinently into a flood of tears.
John Niel was a very simple-minded man, and it never struck him to attribute her grief to any other cause than anxiety at the state of affairs and at her incarceration for an indefinite period in a besieged town that ran the daily risk of being taken vi et armis. Still he was a little hurt at the manner of his reception after his long and most perilous journey, which is not, perhaps, to be wondered at.
“Well, Jess,” he said, “I think that you might speak a little more kindly to me, considering—considering all things. There, don’t cry, they are all right at Mooifontein, and I dare say that we shall win back there somehow some time or other. I had a nice business to get here at all, I can tell you.”
Suddenly she stopped weeping and smiled, her tears passing away like a summer storm. “How did you get through?” she asked. “Tell me all about it, Captain Niel,” and accordingly he did.
She listened in silence while he sketched the chief events of his journey, and when he had done she spoke in quite a changed tone.
“It is very good and kind of you to have risked your life like this for me. Only I wonder that you did not all of you see that it would be of no use. We shall both be shut up here together now, that is all, and that will be very sad for you and Bessie.”