"She 's alive," thought Margaret, laying the letter at last in her lap. "Dear old Amy, what a wonderful world she lives in! But then, she 'd furnish any world with complications."
Twenty feet way, Ford had his little easel between his outstretched legs and was frowning absorbedly from it to the Karoo and back again. Twenty feet away on her other side, Mr. Samson was crackling a three-weeks-old copy of The Morning Post into readable dimensions. Before her, across the railing of the stoep, the Karoo lifted its blind face to the gathering might of the sun.
"Even this," continued Margaret. "She 'd find this inexhaustible. She was born with an appetite for life. I seem to have lost mine."
From the great front door emerged to the daylight the solid rotundity of Fat Mary, billowing forth on flat bare feet and carrying in her hand a bunch of the long crimson plumes of the aloe, that spiky free-lance of the veld which flaunts its red cockade above the abomination of desolation. Fat Mary spied Margaret and came padding towards her, her smile lighting up her vast black face with the effect of "some great illumination surprising a festal night."
"For Missis," she remarked, offering the crimson bunch.
Margaret sat up in her chair with an exclamation. "Flowers!" she said. "Are they flowers? They 're more like great thick feathers. Where did you get them, Mary?"
Fat Mary giggled awkwardly. "A Kafir bring 'um," she explained. "He say—for Missis Harding, an' give me a ticky (a threepenny piece). Fool—that Kafir!"
Margaret stared, holding the fat, fleshy crimson things in her hands.
"Oh!" she said, understanding. "Where is he, Mary? The Kafir, I mean?"
Fat Mary shook her head placidly. "Gone," she said; and waved a great hand to the utter distance of the heat haze. "That Kafir gone, Missis. He come before breakfus'; Missis in bed. Say for Missis Harding an' give me ticky. Fool! Talk English—an' boots!"