Suddenly she gave a cry. A bee’s sting had embedded itself in the sensitive flesh of her lower lip, and an exquisite needle-like pain brought tears to her eyes. He saw at once what had happened and sprang up.

"I’ll get it out. Hold still a minute."

Touching her face with strong fingers grown extraordinarily delicate, he pinched the lip until he was able to extract the tiny dark sting. She closed her eyes and a tear slipping down her cheek wetted his fingers.

Then he kissed her with the honey and salt wet on her lips, as one might kiss a little crying child. And almost as simply and naturally she kissed him back. When she realised what she had done, her heart seemed to become hollow in the sunlight for one moment, then full, brimming over with some strange wine. She wanted to be furious with him, but looking at his eyes no words would come to her lips. They stood there staring at each other like people in a dream. The sight of Koos coming back recalled her to herself, the spell under which she had been, broke. Frigid conventional words came to her lips, of the kind she might have spoken in a London drawing-room.

"You forget yourself! …​ How dared you!"

His clear tanned face assumed a deep flush and he turned away abruptly. If she expected an apology she was disappointed. No other word was spoken between them, and when they mounted the coach it was by the driver’s side he sat, leaving the whole of the back seat to her.

She found in this something to be thankful for, though her soul resented it. Slowly, with the gold of afternoon and red lights of evening, her anger faded away, but the enchantment of Africa faded too, and she felt cold, cold to the bone.

At the next stopping-place, a young Dutchman was waiting for the coach, and went on with them the following morning. He turned out to be a sprightly fellow from the Eastern Province, anxious to air his views on the subject of Cape politics and ostrich farming. Vivienne earned a reputation for unsociability by retiring under the shadow of a large felt hat she had obtained at the hotel store. But Kerry, who to make way for the stranger had been obliged to return to the back seat, covered her strange manner and appearance by sitting forward and entering into long arguments. Sometimes both men would lapse into the Boer taal, and for frequent spells not a word they said was intelligible to the girl. At such times, Kerry seemed more than a stranger to her. She burned to remember what had passed between them, and shrank away as far as possible into her corner. He appeared to notice nothing. His own manner became curiously heavy, dull as the day went on; a day of torrid heat, air full of thunder and thick with dust. Everyone fell into silence at last, and no sound but the driver’s bitter curses and the flack of his whip broke the brooding weariness.

In the late afternoon, a mule fell dead-lame, delaying arrival at Fisher’s until past midnight. As she limped from the coach sick with fatigue, Vivienne caught a glimpse by lantern-light of Kerry’s face. It was strangely distorted, with eyes bright and bloodshot. The sight of it revolted her, even as his voice speaking the coarse gutteral taal had done. But she was too tired to care about anything. Her whole mind had concentrated itself on the thought of bed, and a longing to extend her weary bones in sleep. So that when on the stoep, as they waited to be led to their huts, Kerry came near her muttering something indistinguishable, she turned away from him dully, with eyes and ears only for the woman who was to show the way.

It was not until late the next morning that her mind cleared enough to think. Then her first wonder was why she had not been called to rejoin the coach. After lying still a long time, she remembered the plan that she was to be left at this place, and made haste to dress to find out whether the coach had gone without her. Before her clothes were on, a knock came at the door, and she opened it a crack to the stupid, sad-looking woman of the night before. The following dialogue ensued:

"If you want korfie and grub I’ll bring it to you. The big baas said you was to have what you wanted."

"Have they gone?"

"Ya. The coach went at six. The big baas said you was too sick to go and must rest in bed till he sends for you."

"Very well; bring me something to eat, please." She got back into bed, and little of her face was showing when the woman returned with food, set it down dully, and departed.

Time and space in which to think, lying there behind the bolted door, battered mud walls about her, bulging thatch overhead full of fat black spiders that sat immovable as Fate in their lairs. And her thoughts were of the long, long kind, though there was little of youth in them. She was so silent that the flies pretended to believe her dead and descended upon her in black battalions. The struggle to keep them off made the whole business just a little more sordid, and roused in her a kind of sullen fury against Africa and all that in it was.

"I must get out of it," she muttered to herself. "It is driving me mad. I must have been mad to let that man kiss me—​a common oaf who talks Dutch in that horrible throaty way—​a sort of Boer—​how dared he!"

She tried to remember his face as it had revolted her the night before, suffused with blood and swollen, but she could only remember the keen, quiet eyes full of light and distance, and how they had darkened when he looked at her, and how they had measured up Roper, and how her heart had leaped in her breast at the sound of the first blow.

"I am mad," she reiterated wearily, and covered her eyes. "This miserable country has driven me mad!"

At sundown the next day, the woman brought a parcel and the news that a cart had come and would be ready to start again at dawn. The parcel contained a man’s mackintosh, a dark blue coat and skirt of simple not to say skimpy design, a white blouse, and sailor hat. She shook out the Philistine garments carefully as if she thought a scorpion—​or a note-- might be hidden among them. But no sign of either.

"Tant mieux!" she said at last, and discarded the rush hat and tattered shirt almost violently as if with them she hoped to throw off the last trace of her veld madness.

Wrapped in the mackintosh she slipped out to the waiting cart in the dimness of the dawn, and started on the last lap of the journey that was originally to have taken her ten days, but had already extended to six weeks! Only when the lights of Buluwayo gleamed before her at last could she really believe the end had come.

Within a week, civilisation had its grip on her once more, and she was her cynical self with the nut of bitter dust back in her breast.

The opening up of the country had brought a fashionable English crowd to Buluwayo, among them many people that she knew and had special feuds with. One of the latter was Lady Angela Vinning, a woman with a good figure, beautiful, pleading green eyes, and thumbs down on every other woman except those who for the moment happened to fit into her schemes. She and Vivienne were staying at the same hotel, and exchanged polite greetings and glances of disdain every morning. Vivienne despised her for what she was: false, unscrupulous, and mean-souled. She detested Vivienne for being fifteen years younger than herself, and that is the most poignant of all the feminine hatreds.

Other grounds for general detestation by her own sex soon made patent to Vivienne were: (1) that Wolfe Montague, the richest man in South Africa, took no pains to hide the fact that his main business in Buluwayo was to be perpetually at her heels; (2) that having been romantically lost on the veld and found again no one quite knew how, she was the most-talked-of person in the country; and (3) that she had turned up looking perfectly radiant, and been seen of none until after regaining possession of her extremely chic clothes. Tales with a tang to them were soon flying round Buluwayo. Vivienne assumed her mask and with a calm mien went about her business of "writing up" the country. But behind the mask and the mien she was raging. It was London and the torment of the last few years over again, only at closer quarters, for here she must share the same hotel with her enemies, run into them daily, and smile and exchange sweet words with them.

"If I could only wipe my boots on them all instead!" she thought savagely, and at such moments almost decided to marry Montague, whose flame grew more and more ardent with the days. But always a shadow slipped between her and her decision—​a shadow with grey eyes! Where had those eyes disappeared to? She never saw them, and no one mentioned the name Kerry. The thing puzzled her, yet she was grimly glad. Of what use getting that strange torment of honey and perfume and wild places into her veins again, when she cared only for the call of civilisation, longed only for power and the weapons of wealth with which to smite these little-minded women who thought themselves so clever and fine? She would never be happy until she had power to make others suffer as she had been made to suffer. What had such an ambition to do with the honeyed madness she had known on the banks of the Lundi? Nothing.