“Do you know anything of gardening?” he demanded suddenly, breaking the silence.
“Sure, it’s little I don’t know,” returned Antony. “’Twas a bit of wild earth my garden was before I took it in hand. Now there’s peach trees, and nectarines, and plum trees in it, and all the vegetables any man could be wanting, and flowers fit for a queen’s drawing-room. There’s roses as big as your fist. Oh, ’tis a fine garden it is out on—” he broke off, “out beyont,” he concluded.
“On the veldt,” suggested Doctor Hilary quietly.
“’Twas the veldt I was after meaning,” responded Antony smiling, “but I thought ’twould be as well to get my tongue used to forgetting the sound of the word, lest it should slip out some fine day, when I wasn’t meaning it to at all.”
“Wise, anyhow,” agreed Doctor Hilary, and he too smiled. “But you understand that I—well, I happen to know all the circumstances of this arrangement.”
Antony laughed. “I was thinking as much,” he confessed.
“I wonder—” began Doctor Hilary. And then he stopped. He had been about to wonder aloud as to why on earth Antony should have accepted the conditions, why he should have exchanged the freedom and untrammelled spaces of the veldt for the conventional life of England, even with the Hall and a goodly income, at the end of the year, to the balance. He knew most assuredly that nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand would have done so, and he knew that he himself was the thousandth who would not. His exceedingly brief acquaintance with Antony had given him the impression that he, also, was a thousandth man.
“You wonder—?” queried Antony.
“I wonder how you’ll like the life,” said Doctor Hilary, though it was not precisely what he had originally intended to say.
“’Tis England,” said Antony briefly.