The Kafir seated himself again in his old place and let his hand fall upon the mass of clay which he had been fashioning for Paul's instruction. He was the least perturbed of the three of them. He sank his finger-tops in the soft plasticity of the stuff, and smiled across it at the others, at the boy, embarrassed and not sure of Margaret yet, and at her, still mastered by her curiosity. It was almost as if he were used to being regarded with astonishment, and his self-possession had a touch of that deliberate lime-lit quality which distinguishes the private lives of preachers and actors and hunchbacks.
For the rest, he seemed to be about Margaret's age, clean run and of the middle stature. Watching him, Margaret was at a loss to discover what it was about him that seemed so oddly commonplace and familiar till she noted his clothes. They were "tweeds." Though he had apparently slept on the bare ground in them and made them a buffer between his skin and many emergencies of travel, they were still tweeds, such as any sprightly youth of Bayswater might affect for a week-end in the country.
It needed only a complexion and an attitude to render him inconspicuous on a golf-course, but in that place, under the majestic sun, with the heat-dazzle of the Karoo at his back, his very clothes made him the more incomprehensible.
Margaret realized that he was waiting for her to speak.
"You model, then?" she asked, striving to speak in an altogether matter-of-fact tone, as though to come across gifted, English-speaking negroes, giving art lessons in odd corners, were nothing unusual.
"Just a little," he answered. "Enough to help Paul to make a beginning. Eh, Paul?"
Paul nodded, turning to Margaret. "He knows lots," he said. "He 's been in London, too. It was there he learned to—to model."
Paul had a way of uttering the word "London" which conveyed to Margaret's ready sympathies some little part of what it meant to him, the bright unattainable home of wonderful activities, the land of heart's desire.
"In London?" She turned to the Kafir, "London seems a long way from here, doesn't it?"
"Yes; a long way." He was not smiling now. "It is seven months since I left London," he said; "and already it seems dim and unreal. It's as if I 'd dreamed about it and only remembered parts of my dream."