'Well, it seemed pretty wild. The whole thing might be a try on. And I didn't want to talk about it till I'd got the money and we could start home.'
But if, he said, she hadn't been asleep when he came to say good-bye he'd have told her. In fact that's what he came to say.
Norah felt that the petty deception had been the fatal moment of her life.
He did not say much about his journey north. Quite early he had decided there was no object in accompanying Jones to Elizabethville and had made straight for the Valley of Ivory, as he named it. Sceptical to the last, Archie had to admit that the place came within measurable distance of Jones' enthusiasm. Of his adventures there he gave no account.
'You feel a bit of a swine the first elephant you shoot,' he mentioned. It's so big, so contemptuously trustful. You seem to have taken an unfair advantage of a large-minded opponent. And you've destroyed something older and longer in the making than yourself. Like burning an old master.'
The first hitch had come after he had shot his first two bulls. That was the number allowed him on his thousand franc license. He applied at the 'Poste' for the second license he had been promised, to be met with a bland refusal. No second licenses were being issued. He had considered his position. If he gave up the hunt, he would go back to Norah with a hundred or a hundred and fifty more sovereigns in his pocket. Even with a first-rate sale of his stock that wouldn't be much use.
The alternative was to stay and poach.
'Everybody does it up there,' was the excuse he gave Norah.
But Archie never had cared for the example of other people; the force which urged this law-abiding Scot to break the law was his love for Norah. Where she was concerned, he stuck at nothing. He had not hesitated to abandon his farm and two years' work to satisfy what most men would call a fancy. A Bulamatadi law did not stand much chance. The pity is that he was so careful to conceal from Norah this one recklessness and its source.
Not that it was necessary to surcharge her cup. He had said enough to show that while she flirted with Dick his only thought had been her service.