"What is the use of pretending I am too good for it, and was made for better things?" she meditated, and her smile took the little bitter twist that was now becoming habitual. With it still on her lips, she looked over the side of the carriage into a pair of grey eyes full of veld light and far places. A dog-cart containing two men had passed and gone, but not too soon for her to recognise Kerry and see an answering flash of recognition in his eyes.

Gone too her satisfaction, such as it was, in the gamble and the game. Fever died out of her veins and her heart lay cold as a stone. She looked not a girl, but a pale tired woman of thirty when she stepped out of the carriage and climbed over the little sloping kopjes that gave a view of the six thousand acres that would some day be a famous gold mine. Silent, lovely acres they were, full of colour and peace. Low-spreading trees standing alone, scattered purple rocks on which lay patches of rust red as blood, a carpet of wild grasses and little star-shaped veld flowers. Here and there great boulders were pitched together with enough earth to harbour a spiking tree and trailing creepers. Some lines of red gum had been planted and in their shadow stood a little thatched hut, before whose door, its slender branches tapping the thatch, grew a little tree of the laburnum class, laden with clustering golden bloom that gave a lovely scent.

A sudden poignant regret, stronger than herself, rushed through her, that the peace of these brooding acres of loneliness should be destroyed by what lay hidden under them. In imagination, she saw the dirt and debris of a new gold diggings, the purple rocks shattered by dynamite, trees and flowers torn out and lying dead, the little perky sand-blooms trodden down. All for gold to poison the hearts of men and buy the souls of women as hers had been poisoned, bought!

Was it too late now to repent, and instead of digging out the gold keep the land as it was, silent and peaceful? Go and live in that little thatched hut with the tree by the door? She dreamed with the thought a moment then turned bitterly away. The land was not even hers unless she could pay for it with the gold that came out of it! It was Montague’s as she was Montague’s until she repaid the thousand pounds. She must go back to the scheme of avarice and duplicity she had entered into with eyes open and heart greedy for power and revenge. Her path was clear before her. It had nothing to do with peace and beauty and nothing in it that was noble, but it was her path. As she got back into the carriage and drove away, she knew that the memory of that place would haunt her all her days.

"Another restless ghost to walk the weary corridors of memory!" she said to herself.

Cornwall banished it for a while with the business of signing the transfer deed, but at the dance given by the magistrate that night it returned. A pair of eyes looking at her across space and gems and jewels, as once she had seen them stare across the veld, brought back the ghost and made it seem a very alive thing. She had never seen Kerry in the evening dress of convention before, and tried to feel astonished that he should resemble a distinguished man of the world rather than a sort of Boer. Inexplicably, as she stared, she forgot everything except to notice how worn and ill he looked. Over the shoulder of her partner, she met his clear gaze, and it became curiously and inextricably mixed in her memory with the lovely peace of the land she had visited that day. It was hot for dancing, and most people were beginning to meander out of doors and stay there.

"I want to introduce to you a great pal of mine—​Kerry de Windt," said her partner, Marshall Brunton, who was also her host the magistrate. "May I?"

"Kerry de Windt?" she answered slowly.

"A splendid chap. He’s here to-night, after a bad go of fever and pneumonia he got somehow on his way up-country."

"On his way up-country?" she repeated mechanically.

"It appears that he was coming up by coach but left it at Palapye to go off on a hunt for a little child that was lost from some waggons. Everyone had given up the search, but he found the child away in a wild krantz, starving, with an old mad Bechuana boy."

"Was it’s mother alive?" Vivienne had a sickening vision of that poor mother sitting, hat in hand, outside her hut.

"He got back just in time to save her reason. Queer fellow! We’d never have known anything about it from him, of course. The story came up by wire from Palapye."

"Is that he talking to Lady Angela Vinning?"

"Yes. Shall we go over?"

"No. Take me out into the air please," she faltered. Her face was white as death. So he it was whom she had robbed! Kerry de Windt! The man who had not only saved the child’s life, but herself, from God knew what worse horrors than death!

It was out in one of the verandahs, dimly lit by Japanese lanterns, that he was brought and introduced to her.

"You two should find plenty to talk about, as you both know all about being lost on the veld," said the host gaily, and hurried away to other duties.

They stood looking at each other. She wanted to cry out something, but she did not know what it was. His face was very haggard with an irony she had never known about his mouth. In the end, all her stiff lips found to say was:

"I am glad you are better of your illness."

"Thank you. I have something on which to congratulate you also, it seems." The flavour of irony was on his tongue as well as on his lips.

"I did not know it was your land," she stammered, and he stared a moment.

"Oh, that," he said carelessly. "You’re welcome. It’s not the loss of that I mind."

There was a silence. They had sat down in a dim corner. At last her voice came faintly.

"What then have you lost?" She hid her hand on which shone the yellow diamond.