It had been at Ethel's suggestion that the tea-table had been set, that hot afternoon, under the trees in the heart of the garden.Just at the crossing of two broad walks, a vine-roofed kiosk gave shelter from the late sunshine, while its bamboo screens were half raised to show the long perspective of garden walk and distant lawn.Save for the orange grove at the left and the ash-colored leaves of the silver wattle above them, Weldon could almost have fancied himself in England.The lawn with its conventional tennis court was essentially English; English, too, the tray with its fixtures.
There, however, the resemblance stopped.The ebony handmaiden who brought out the tray was never found in private life outside the limits of South Africa.When she sought foreign countries, it was merely as a denizen of a midway plaisance.
"Yes, and their names are their most distinctive feature," Alice assented to Weldon's comment.
"More than their mouths?" he asked, with a flippant recollection of Kruger Roberts engrossed in his jam tin.
"At least as much so," she responded, laughing."You notice that Icalled our maid Syb.She told me, when she came, that her old master named her Sybarite.I understood it, the next day, when I found her snoring on the drawing-room sofa."During the time of her answer, Weldon took his opportunity to look steadily at his young hostess.Up to the moment of the shifting of the groups, he had been too fully absorbed in the pleasure of once more meeting Ethel to pay much heed to any one else.Now he turned his gray eyes upon Alice Mellen, partly from real interest in her personality; partly to counterbalance the rapt attention which Ethel was bestowing upon the Captain.She had been the selfsame Ethel, a bundle of contradictions that attracted him at one moment and antagonized him at the next.He liked her absolutely; his very liking for her increased the sense of antagonism when, for the instant, she departed from his ideals of what she ought to be.And yet, Weldon was candid enough to admit to himself that she departed from them, rather than fell below them.Often as she had antagonized him, she had never really disappointed him.
As for Alice Mellen, he confessed himself surprised.Gathering together all that Ethel had ever told him of her cousin, of her living her entire life out there in the southern end of South Africa, of her desire to be a nurse, he had pieced together an effigy of the combined traits of a Hottentot and a vivandiere.This girl answered to neither description.Her clothes and her manners and her accent all had come, albeit with slow indirectness, from London.Not only would she and her gowns pass muster in a crowd; but furthermore she would end by being the focal point of a good share of that crowd.Nevertheless, Weldon found it impossible to discover her most distinctive point.Even while he sought it, he wondered to himself whether this might not be another cousin of whom he had never heard.The women doctors and nurses at home wore stout shoes and had pockets let in at the seams of their frocks, useful, doubtless, but with an unlovely tendency to yawn and show their contents.This girl was a mere fluff of pale yellow organdie which brought out the purplish lights in her ink-black hair.
"Did you have the heart to disturb her?" he asked, reverting to the subject of Syb's nap.
"I was forced to.She was on all the cushions, and I needed one for myself.She took it in good part, though.She told me she had been disturbed, the night before, by the snoring of the parrot, two rooms away.As a result, she left me feeling that the apology really ought to come from me.""Is that the way of the race?" Weldon queried, as he set down his empty cup."If so, you make me tremble.""Why?"
"Because, without in the least intending it, I have accumulated a boy."She looked up suddenly.
"How do you mean?"
