'I'd have been pretty mean if I had,' she put in. 'I made you come out here.'
So when at last her restraint had snapped, he treated the revelation with even more than his normal solemnity. After his habit he looked at the issue from both sides. For his part, the life and the country were ideal. And he was, he believed, on the slow gradient that leads his kind of man to success. But then Norah, she told him, hated the farm, the forest, everything. And the issue she did not believe worth waiting for.
Archie thought too clearly to assume the right of any one, even an Englishman, to impose his wishes on a fellow man; so it did not occur to him that he might keep Norah in surroundings she disliked. At the same time his deep-seated, if unvocal, love for Norah turned down the solution that she should go back to England, while he stayed and worked the farm. The nearest he could now bring himself towards some expression of this was to murmur, 'I didn't think then I could do without you'—words which added remorse to the pity in Norah's breast.
His logical brain accepted the only choice that remained—to take Norah back to England and find work there.
Once he had decided, it was not his way to brood on the cost of abandoning the farm that had absorbed two years and over of his life. He chose without murmuring the lesser of the evils that confronted him. Many days would have followed of slow consideration of plans to realise his assets, had not the pace been forced by no less humble an instrument of Providence than 'Mr. Jones of the Congo.'
'That night at dinner,' explained Archie, 'I said I was thinking of selling the herd. Jones' eyes lit up and he told me he had a pal on the Katanga who'd buy them.'
Archie had not been greatly impressed until he learnt that Jones' friend was head compound manager of a group of mines. The contract for the miners' meat was in his hands.
'If you let me handle the deal,' Jones had said, 'I'll get you a better price for "live weight" than you'll get anywhere else for "dead."'
'Bribery all round,' said Archie to himself, 'but that's not my concern.'
'You've been good to me,' added the "stiff," 'I'll only take five per cent. on the transaction.'