IT was a turgid, sun-smitten Sunday afternoon at the Portals' house on the Berea. Through the open French windows of the drawing-room came the chink of many tea-cups, and a desultory but not unsprightly murmur of conversation. Some one's hand was straying absent-mindedly on the keys of the Bechstein, making little ripples, and sometimes a girl would laugh on two notes—a short, but peculiarly melodious sound like the beginning of a song in a bird's throat. Evelyn Carson, on the west side of the verandah, arguing with Bill Portal about water-fowl in Madagascar, found that laugh curiously distracting. It reminded him of an old dream that he was always trying to forget.

"You're thinking of a Francolin-partridge, my dear fellow," he said to Portal; "very dark feathering ... almost black ... a little bigger than the Natal grey hens." (There was that little tender laugh again! God! What a dream that was!)

"Not at all," disputed Portal. "They were grouse, I tell you ... sand-grouse ... the male bird has dark-brown wings ... very light back and a pencilled head ... rather like English grouse ... with a black neck. I got scores of them at Solarey ... splendid sporting shots——"

He lifted his voice slightly in his enthusiasm, and it was heard round in the east verandah, where Mrs. Portal was sitting with her great friend, Mary Capron, two other women, and Luce Abinger.

"Listen to the blood-shedders!" said Mrs. Capron.

"Yes, one of them is Bill," said Clem, "and I hoped he was looking after people inside! Who is he talking to, I wonder."

Mrs. Capron opened her lips to answer, then closed them again and looked away at the sea. Luce Abinger smiled to himself.

"That's C-Carson," he said. "He c-came up with me."

Abinger's slight stammer arrested people's attention and made them listen to what he had to say. But to do him justice, what he had to say was usually worth listening to. It is always worth while to be amused, and a man's malice is invariably more amusing than a woman's because it is not so small, and is more daring. What Abinger did not dare with his tongue, he made bold to let you know with his eyes, which were as bad as they could be. Not that he looked at all women with the same look Sophie Cornell had once complained of. He was far too clever for that—he had as many sets of expressions for his eyes as he had for his tongue.

But in whatsoever way he looked, he always made the woman he was talking to tÊte-À-tÊte feel that she was doing something rather wicked and none the less fascinating because she could not be indicted on it by Mrs. Grundy. And then his appearance was so peculiarly revolting! That frightful scar running all the way down one side of his clean-shaven face, from his eye to his chin, must have been made with a knife; but no one knew how it had been done, and that made it all the more mysterious. Certainly he was not communicative on the subject.

At present he was sitting on the clean, sun-burnt boards of the verandah floor, with his back against the wall and his knees drawn up, peacefully considering the four women arranged in chairs on either side of him. Mrs. Portal, bunched up with her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands, was not pretty, but her face bore the marks of race, and her hair and her kind Irish eyes were full of sunshine. Abinger considered that she had less style than any woman he knew, but that it must be distinctly interesting to be Bill Portal. Mrs. Gerald Lace was silent and reposeful, with the inevitable silent reposefulness of a woman with a fourteen-inch waist. Mrs. GruyÈre, warm and pink, fanned herself vigorously with an expensive painted fan, and took breath for a fresh onslaught upon the characters of her friends. Mrs. Capron, staring out at the sea with her lovely, golden eyes, was sufficiently beautiful to be forgiven for not saying much. It was enough to look at her.

Durban lay below them in green and white array, but the green was too green, and the white blazed even through the drapery of passion-plant leaves that hung and clambered on the verandah and let in the sunshine upon them in jaggling Chinese patterns. The garden was delightfully, raggedly picturesque. Two sloping lawns were divided by a tall hedge of Barbadoes-thorn. There was a grove of orange-trees, and a miniature forest of mangoes. Scattered everywhere, grew golden clots of sunflowers, and away to the right a big Bougainvillea bush flaunted its fearful purple-magenta blossoms against the blue. Far beyond was the sea.

The Portals' house stood so high on the Berea that no sound from the town or the sea reached it on a still day. The peace in the verandah was unbroken, save for the cheep-cheeping of some tame guinea-fowl in a neighbouring garden.

If only Mrs. GruyÈre could have ceased from troubling, they would all have been at rest. "Why can she not be calm and still, like Mrs. Lace?" thought Abinger. Mrs. Lace was not over-burdened with brains, but she could say "Oh!" and "Really?" quite prettily at appropriate intervals, and he much preferred her to Mrs. GruyÈre, a most tiresome person, who, if you did not tell her the truth, invented it. She now began to worry Mrs. Portal about a girl inside, whom Abinger, not long arrived and having got no further than his present seat in the verandah, had not seen, but from the venomous tone of Mrs. GruyÈre's inquiries he gathered that she must, in some fashion, be worth seeing. Mrs. Portal said in an airy way she had, that she knew nothing of Miss Chard except that she was a Cheltenham College girl, and had pretty ankles—"both highly desirable qualifications, surely?"

Mrs. GruyÈre, who had been educated at a Colonial seminary, immediately drew her feet, which had been obstructing Abinger's view of the Indian Ocean, into the seclusion of her peculiarly ungraceful, though doubtless expensive, skirt, and pursued the subject with more intense malignity. Abinger was of opinion that Mrs. Portal had probably made a life-long enemy for Miss Chard: which showed that she was harassed, for he knew her to be the soul of tact and kindliness. As an old ally, he felt that it behoved him to listen and prepare a weapon for the defence.

"But, dear Mrs. Portal, desirable qualifications are not always sufficient ones. Where did she come from, and who are her people, I wonder? It seems strange in a small place like Durban, not to have met her before! What does she want here?"

"She paints charmingly," was all Mrs. Portal vouchsafed—"most beautiful little water-colours." After a moment's consideration she added: "She is going to do my miniature."

Thereafter, she looked dreamily into space, apparently thinking of something else—an old ruse of hers when harassed about her harum-scarum acquaintances. Abinger began to think it highly probable that she had met the remarkable Miss Chard in a tea-shop, become interested in her face (or her ankles), and gone up and spoken to her; but he quite understood that these illegitimate proceedings must be concealed from such a keeper of seals and red tape as Mrs. GruyÈre.

"Indeed! An artist?" that lady insisted abominably. "I wonder if——"

Mrs. Portal removed her charming eyes from blue space and looked for the hundredth part of a second in the direction of Abinger. He dashed briskly into the conversation.

"Yes; an exceedingly c-clever artist. I saw an exhibition of her pictures somewhere in Bond Street last year. Some of her sunset-effects were brilliant—quite Whistlerian. But," he cocked his head meditatively for a second, "if I remember rightly, it was with her miniatures that she made her chief hit—yes, decidedly her——"

"Really?" said Mrs. Gerald Lace, all attention, thinking what a charming miniature her blonde beauty would make.

Mrs. GruyÈre said nothing. She was completely knocked out of the ring for five seconds, during which time Mrs. Portal smiled an amazed smile at the sunflowers on the lawn, and Abinger, with the pride of one who has done exceeding well, rose and handed tea-cups and cake from the tray of a neat and pretty maid—Hyacinth's English nurse, to be precise, who was always harnessed-in on Sunday afternoons. Having modestly helped himself to three sandwiches, he reseated himself upon the floor, for time was up: Mrs. GruyÈre had got her second wind.

Could it be true, she demanded of him, that there was talk of that odious Sir Evelyn Carson getting a peerage next? Why should he have got the Administratorship of Borapota, when there were so many fine men born and bred in Africa, much more eligible for the post? (Her own brother, in fact—hinc illÆ!) Wasn't it a fact that Carson was exiled to Africa ten years ago because he had been mixed up in a famous divorce suit with Royalty and dared not show his nose in England again? Did Abinger consider it likely that Carson would marry May Mappin, who was still scandalously in love with him and ready to throw herself at him, together with the fortune which her father had made by "running guns" to the Zulus in '76?

"—And was made Mayor, and died!" she finished as though she had been reciting a new kind of creed.

Some portion, at least, of this surprising indictment had made Mrs. Capron's tinted cheek pale with anger. Clem Portal, too, was disturbed. She glanced fiercely at Mrs. GruyÈre, and remarked with great emphasis and point:

"Rot!"

Mrs. GruyÈre looked as if she would have liked to snort at this rude reception of her news; she contented herself, however, with a sniff—a Colonial habit of hers.

Mrs. Lace also roused herself to an effort. She had not Mrs. Portal's pluck to fire boldly in the face of the enemy, but she was inspired to make a little side-attack.

"He would never dream of marrying a Colonial: Gerald told me so."

Mrs. GruyÈre's nostrils broadened like a hippo's; she could have tomahawked Mrs. Lace on the spot. For a moment she cast her inward eye back across the trail of Mrs. Lace's past—if she had only been a Johannesburg crow, with three coats of whitewash, how Mrs. GruyÈre would have turned the waterspouts of truth on her! But as it happened, Gerald Lace had extracted his blonde bride from a tender home at Kingston-on-Thames—and that was a far cry! And since her marriage, she was known to be what is called "absolutely de-vo-ted." What satisfaction can be got out of a woman like that? Mrs. GruyÈre was obliged to hide her tomahawk for the time being. Smiling a thin smile with an edge as sharp as a razor to it, she addressed herself to the audience at large.

"At any rate, no one will deny that May Mappin is still throwing herself at his head. Isn't that so, Mr. Abinger? You practically live with him and should know."

Abinger's answers were as various as Mrs. Portal's sandwiches, and as liberally supplied with mustard.

1. Yes; but he didn't live with Miss Mappin.
2. Carson had not asked his advice about the best place to spend a honeymoon.
3. Miss Mappin had not told him that she loved Carson.
4. He did not read Carson's letters.
5. He could not swear that Carson was not already married.
6. All women were in love with Carson, anyway.

At that, Mrs. GruyÈre sat back satisfied.

"I knew it," she said triumphantly, "and no good can come of it." She made a hollow in her lap for her cup of tea and began rolling her veil into a thick, black stole across the end of her nose.

No one was quite sure what she meant, and no one particularly cared, but Mrs. Portal thought it quite time poor silly May Mappin was left alone. Mrs. Portal talked scandal herself and enjoyed it, but she didn't backbite, which is the difference between good and ill nature.

"You ask too much, Mrs. GruyÈre," said she, sipping tea from her blue cup, delicately as a bee sips honey from a bluebell. "When you are in love with a man like Evelyn Carson, the only thing you can do is to pray with fasting and tears that no bad may come of it."

"When I am in love!" said Mrs. GruyÈre loudly.

"Oh!" cried Mrs. Lace with a shocked little laugh.

"Isn't it true, Mr. Abinger?" Clem asked.

"Oh, Carson is not so black as he's painted," said he with a great air of liberality.

"As he paints, I suppose, you mean," pertly rejoined Mrs. GruyÈre.

"There is a form of colour-blindness that makes its victim see everything black!" said Mrs. Capron drily. Mrs. GruyÈre sniffed again.

"You need be colour-blind when you look at his eyes," she said unpleasantly; "but some people have a morbid liking for deformity."

They all looked astonished.

"Deformity!" cried Mrs. Capron; "why, everybody admires his striking eyes!"

"And, dear lady," said Abinger, with great tendresse, "do you really suppose that the colour of Carson's eyes has anything to do with it? It's the flame inside him that draws us and scorches us. He's made up of fire and iron, and——"

"Brass," said Mrs. GruyÈre neatly—for her.

At this opportune moment Carson sauntered round the corner and joined them, and Mrs. GruyÈre's face became so like a Bougainvillea flower that there was hardly any difference, except that the Bougainvillea was prettier.

"How do you do, Sir Evelyn?" said Mrs. Portal, tendering him her hand tranquilly. "Talking of brass, can it be true that you are very rich?"

Seeing no chair, Carson seated himself next to Abinger on the floor—"two bad, dissolute men, cheek by jowl," said Mrs. GruyÈre to herself.

"Not very," he said apologetically, smiling at them all with his unusual eyes. "Not so rich as Abinger. He says he has two pounds a week for life. But we think he exaggerates."

Mrs. Portal and Mrs. Capron began to laugh, and Mrs. Lace to wonder how they could wear such nice boots on such small incomes. But Mrs. GruyÈre, thoroughly disgusted with the contemptible tone of the conversation, was about to rise and leave the scene, when there came a general exodus from the drawing-room, preceded by Portal and a girl, who was laughing in her throat like a bird about to begin a song.

It was Poppy.

The two bad men looked up.

She was amazingly arrayed in a gown that was a poem composed in France—silky, creamy muslin, curving from throat to hip, and from hip to foot in sleek full folds like the draperies of a statue. Some unwonted emotion had brought a faint spot of colour to the high-pitched bones of her cheeks, and the pupils of her eyes were so large they seemed to fill her eyes with darkness. She wore a wide hat of pastel-blue straw, wreathed with silken poppies of an ashen shade, and round her neck was slung a great rope of blue-and-green Egyptian scarabei, which had cost her the whole price of one of her plays, and which repaid her now by adding in some mysterious way to her glowing personality.

Clem Portal rose, and, under cover of general conversation, said swiftly to her:

"If Mrs. GruyÈre puts you to the question—you paint—charming little water-colours. You are going to do my miniature."

Poppy stood there, smiling at her through the spraying veils of her hair. Her glowing loveliness had the effect of making the other women in the verandah seem colourless. Even Mary Capron's classical beauty was dimmed.

Carson felt the old dream stir. He gave her a long, long look. As for Abinger, the expression of utter astonishment and bewilderment had passed from his face; he was smiling.

"So this is Miss Rosalind Chard!" he said softly, but not too softly for Carson to hear him.

"Who is she, do you say?" he asked in a low tone.

They had both risen from the floor.

"A Cheltenham College girl, with pretty ankles," was the enigmatic response.

Unaccountably, they both found themselves at Mrs. Portal's elbow. She introduced them with a gay inclusive little: "Les amis de mes amis sont mes amis"; then turned away to bid a guest good-bye.

Miss Chard met Abinger's insolent mocking glance fearlessly, with a prepared heart and, therefore, a prepared smile; then turned to Carson for the first time: looking into his eyes the smile drifted out of her face and suddenly she put up one of her hands and touched, with a curious mystical movement, a dark-green stone she wore at her throat as a brooch. To both men she gave the impression that she was crossing herself, or touching a talisman against something evil.

Abinger stared, grinning. Carson, extremely disconcerted, appeared to turn a deeper shade of brown, and his eyebrows came together in an unbecoming line over his brilliant, sad eyes. Abinger, well acquainted with the Irishman's temper, knew that the girl's action had got him on the raw. If she had been a man she would have been made answerable for a deadly insult. As it was, Carson struggled horribly with himself for a moment, then smiled and made a characteristic remark.

"You are very un-Irish, Miss Chard, in spite of your face and your superstitions."

This, said with great grace and gentleness, meant that no real Irishwoman would have had the abominable taste to notice what Mrs. GruyÈre had termed his "deformity." But the girl either could not, or would not, taste the salty flavour of his compliment. She made a curious answer.

"I do not profess to be Irish."

For some reason Carson took this for a fresh affront, and it was more than he could put up with. All his easily-lighted fires were ablaze now, and the reflection of them could be seen in his eyes. He gave her one fierce look, then turned away without a word. Abinger stood grinning. But the lilac eyes filled with tears, and the scarlet mouth went down at the corners like a child's.

"Oh, you mustn't mind Carson," said Abinger easily. "You see, he has unfortunately got a real Irish monkey for sale."

"An Irish monkey?"

"Yes. Have you never heard of the species? Carson's is quite famous. It used to be a source of revenue to the Transvaal and Rhodesia for years—they thought nothing of giving him fifty pounds for letting it out on the spree."

Her tears had slipped back unused to whence they came; she was now dry-eyed and rather haughty.

"How could I know?" she began stiffly.

Abinger apparently thought it not wholly out of place to deliver her a short lecture on the undesirability of hurting people's feelings, together with the information that Carson, though hot-tempered and rather mad, was one of the finest gentlemen in the world and happened to share the misfortune of his nationality with a few of the most charming people in South Africa, not excluding their pleasant hostess—Mrs. Portal.

By the time he had finished his remarks Miss Chard had regained her tranquillity.

"Thank you," said she sweetly. "I think it very nice and friendly of you to tell me all these things. I suppose you are an Irishman, too?"

Some emotion kept Abinger dumb for several seconds; then under her tranquil gaze he recovered himself.

"No, I am a cosmopolitan; incidentally of Scotch birth."

"Indeed!" Miss Chard looked politely interested. "You flatter yourself chiefly on the first, I suppose?"

"I did, until to-day."

"To-day?"

"Yes. A cosmopolitan's chief pride, you see, is in the fact that he can conceal his nationality, whilst able to detect instantly that of the person he is speaking to. Now I should never have guessed that you are—English."

Her colour remained unchanged: her eyes regarded him steadfastly.

"You took me for some new kind of barbarian, perhaps?"

He moved a hand deprecatingly: "Not at all; but if I had been asked for an expression of opinion, I should have said, 'A little Irish vagabond dragged up in Africa.'"

The girl's sweet laugh fell from her lips.

"What a ridiculous thing to say! You evidently have not heard that I have only been in Africa for a few weeks or so—my first visit."

Then, as though the conversation had ceased to interest her, she turned away and began to talk to Portal—who introduced to her a man with a satanic expression on a woman's mouth as Dr. Ferrand. The doctor immediately began to talk to her about "home!"

She stemmed that tide.

"Why talk about 'home'?" she said impatiently. "It is far more interesting out here."

"Why?" cried Ferrand the poetical. "Why? Because the air of 'home' still hangs about you. By just looking at you I know that you have lately heard the jingle of hansom bells, and 'buses rumbling on asphalt, and voices crying, 'Only a penny a bunch!'; that you have been tasting the fog and getting splashed with the mud and smelling the Thames...."

"Yes," said Miss Chard; "and I infinitely prefer the smell of mangoes."

Ferrand would have turned away from her, if he had been able to turn away from any woman.

Mrs. Portal, who had just joined them, agreed with her.

"How can anyone compare the two lives—flowers in your hands and the Indian Ocean blue at your feet, to London with smuts on your nose and nutmeg-graters in your chest?"

But still Ferrand looked at Miss Chard.

"'She is London, she is Torment, she is Town,'" he muttered.

"Don't believe it," said Mrs. Portal in her other ear. "He is his own torment: he has his own box of matches.—Good-bye, Mrs. GruyÈre ... Good-bye, Mrs. Lace; so glad—Thursday, then, for polo, and you're going to call for me; good-bye, good-bye. (You're not going, Cora, you and your husband are staying to supper.)... Good-bye, Mrs. Leigh ... yes—don't forget.... Good-bye."

Everyone was going except the elect few who had been asked to stay to what was called "supper" on Sunday night, because no one wore evening-dress—but was really an extra-specially excellent dinner. They gathered at the end of the verandah, where Carson was swinging little Cinthie Portal in a hammock and talking to Mrs. Capron seated on the low stone balustrade above the steps.

She was a picture in pale-blue muslin, with deep-red roses on her hat. The colour of her hair gave the impression that she was gilt-edged and extremely valuable. Certainly she was the best-dressed Roman in Natal, perhaps even in Africa; but at the moment she was wondering how she could possibly get the address of Miss Chard's dressmaker without asking for it.

"Of course, you are staying, Mary," said Mrs. Portal, sitting down by her and putting an arm around her waist. "And you, too, Karri?"

But Carson had a grievance. He was suffering such bitterness of spirit as only Irishmen with their half-mystical, half-barbaric, half-womanish natures can suffer about nothing at all. The sun had gone out of his sky, bitterness was in his mouth, and a snake ate his heart because a girl, whom he did not know or care about, repudiated Ireland, and touched a stone against the evil of his strange, Irish eyes. And he was conscious of the girl standing at the other end of the hammock now; he could feel the new movement in the hammock since her hand rested on it, and she, too, swayed it gently; and he knew that she was looking at him with dewy and wonderful eyes. Nevertheless, he excused himself to Mrs. Portal.—Thanks—he was sorry, but he must go and look after Bramham—he had promised—etc.

They all expostulated. And Rosalind Chard's eyes, through the veils of her hair, besought him to look her way. With all her heart she willed him to look her way. But after he had finished excusing himself to Clem Portal, he looked Mrs. Capron's way instead.

Portal said that for two brass pins he would go himself and fetch Bramham. De Grey said that Bramham would probably be found dining peaceably at the Club, with no thought of Carson. Abinger declared that he had, in fact, heard Bramham arrange to go and dine with a man from the Rand. Mrs. de Grey remarked that it was a shame that poor Mr. Bramham, even now that his wife was dead, could not go anywhere for fear of meeting Mrs. GruyÈre, who always came and stood near him and began telling someone in a loud voice about his poor devoted wife living and dying like a saint at home.

"Just as though it wouldn't have been far more saintlike to have come out here and minded her sinner, if he is one, which I don't believe," said Mrs. Capron.

"De mortuis!" broke in Clem, gently; and de Grey said, laughing:

"This country is full of sinners who keep their saints at home—and I want to say that some of the saints have a jolly good time. We saw two of them giving a dinner-party at the "CafÉ Royal" last time we were home; and for saints, they did themselves remarkably well—didn't they, Cora? And looked remarkably well too."

"Yes: it's a becoming rÔle—dressed by Paquin," said Cora de Grey drily. She never looked well, and had never had anything better than an Oxford Street gown on her back: but her tongue was as dry as the Karoo, and that helped her through a troublesome world.

Abinger began to stammer softly, and everybody listened.

"B-Bramham will be able to come forth at l-last. Mrs. Gru' has a new nut to crack."

He smiled sardonically and felt in all his pockets as though about to produce the nut—but everyone knew that this was merely a mannerism of his. Mrs. Portal looked at him apprehensively, however, and for one moment Poppy left off willing Eve Carson.

"And it will t-take her all her time to do it," he finished gently—even dreamily.

"You frighten me!" said Clem. "What can you mean?"