Doubtless she overrated the trouble; men and women do not spend their lives in brooding upon the memories of their first loves—if they did, this would be a melancholy world. But to Juanna it was real enough, and remained so for some years. And if a thing is true to the heart, it avails little that reason should give it the lie.
In short, now in the hour of their full property, Leonard and Juanna were making acquaintance with the fact that fortune never gives with both hands, as the French say, but loves to rob with one while she bestows with the other. To few is it allowed to be completely miserable, to none to be completely happy. Their good luck had been so overwhelming in many ways, that it would have partaken of the unnatural, and might well have excited their fears for the future, had its completeness been unmarred by these drawbacks which, such as they were, probably they learned to disremember as the years passed over them bringing them new trials and added blessings.
Perhaps a peep into the future will tell us the rest of the story of Leonard and Juanna Outram better and more truly than any further chronicling of events.
Ten years or so have gone by and Sir Leonard, now a member of Parliament and the Lord-Lieutenant of his county, comes out of church on the first Sunday in May accompanied by his wife, the stateliest matron in the country-side, and some three or four children, boys and girls together, as healthy as they are handsome. After a glance at a certain grave that lies near to the chancel door, they walk homewards across the budding park in the sweet spring afternoon, till, a hundred yards or more from the door of Outram Hall, they pause at the gates of a dwelling known as “The Kraal,” shaped like a beehive, fashioned of straw and sticks, and built by the hands of Otter alone.
Basking in the sunshine in front of this hut sits the dwarf himself, cutting broom-sticks with a knife out of the straightest of a bundle of ash saplings that lie beside him. He is dressed in a queer mixture of native and European costume, but otherwise time has wrought no change in him.
“Greeting, Baas,” he says as Leonard comes up. “Is Baas Wallace here yet?”
“No, he will be down in time for dinner. Mind that you are there to wait, Otter.”
“I shall not be late, Baas, on this day of all days.”
“Otter,” cries a little maid, “you should not make broom-sticks on Sunday, it is very wrong.”
The dwarf grins by way of answer, then speaks to Leonard in a tongue that none but he can understand.