"It is; it can," replied the tramp categorically, and Boy Bailey, in the too, too solid flesh advanced into the room.
Mrs. du Preez had a moment of motionless amaze, and then with a flushed face came in a rush around the table to meet him. They clasped hands and both laughed.
"Why," cried Mrs. du Preez; "if this don't—but Bailey! Where ever do you come from, an' like this? Glad to see you? Yes, I am glad; you 're the first of the old crowd that I 've seen since I—I married."
"Married, eh?" The tramp tempered an over-gallant and enterprising attitude. "Then I mustn't—eh?"
His face was bent towards hers and he still held her hands.
"No; you mustn't," spoke Paul unexpectedly, from the doorway, where he was an absorbed witness of the scene.
They both turned sharply; they had forgotten the boy.
"Don't be silly, Paul," said his mother, rather sharply. "Mr. Bailey was only joking." But she freed her hands none the less, while Mr. Bailey bent his wary gaze upon the boy.
The interruption served to bring the conversation down to a less emotional plane, and Paul sat down on a chair just within the door to watch the unawaited results of promising a meal to a chance tramp. The effect on his mother was not the least remarkable consequence. The veld threw up a lamentable man at your feet; in charity and some bewilderment you took him home to feed him, and thereupon your mother, your weary, petulant, uncertain mother, took him to her arms and became, by that unsavory contact, pink and vivacious.
"There 's more of you," said Mrs. du Preez, making a fresh examination of her visitor. "You 're fatter than what you were, Bailey, in those old days."