“I haven’t been able to swallow a single morsel thinking of you out here starving yourself in the dark.  It’s positively cruel to be so obstinate.  Think of my sufferings.”

“Don’t care.”

I felt as if I could have done her some violence—­shaken her, beaten her maybe.  I said: 

“Your absurd behaviour will prevent me coming here any more.”

“What’s that to me?”

“You like it.”

“It’s false,” she snarled.

My hand fell on her shoulder; and if she had flinched I verily believe I would have shaken her.  But there was no movement and this immobility disarmed my anger.

“You do.  Or you wouldn’t be found on the verandah every day.  Why are you here, then?  There are plenty of rooms in the house.  You have your own room to stay in—­if you did not want to see me.  But you do.  You know you do.”

I felt a slight shudder under my hand and released my grip as if frightened by that sign of animation in her body.  The scented air of the garden came to us in a warm wave like a voluptuous and perfumed sigh.

“Go back to them,” she whispered, almost pitifully.

As I re-entered the dining-room I saw Jacobus cast down his eyes.  I banged the plate on the table.  At this demonstration of ill-humour he murmured something in an apologetic tone, and I turned on him viciously as if he were accountable to me for these “abominable eccentricities,” I believe I called them.

“But I dare say Miss Jacobus here is responsible for most of this offensive manner,” I added loftily.

She piped out at once in her brazen, ruffianly manner: 

“Eh?  Why don’t you leave us in peace, my good fellow?”

I was astonished that she should dare before Jacobus.  Yet what could he have done to repress her?  He needed her too much.  He raised a heavy, drowsy glance for an instant, then looked down again.  She insisted with shrill finality: 

“Haven’t you done your business, you two?  Well, then—­”

She had the true Jacobus impudence, that old woman.  Her mop of iron-grey hair was parted, on the side like a man’s, raffishly, and she made as if to plunge her fork into it, as she used to do with the knitting-needle, but refrained.  Her little black eyes sparkled venomously.  I turned to my host at the head of the table—­ menacingly as it were.

“Well, and what do you say to that, Jacobus?  Am I to take it that we have done with each other?”

I had to wait a little.  The answer when it came was rather unexpected, and in quite another spirit than the question.

“I certainly think we might do some business yet with those potatoes of mine, Captain.  You will find that—­”

I cut him short.

“I’ve told you before that I don’t trade.”

His broad chest heaved without a sound in a noiseless sigh.

“Think it over, Captain,” he murmured, tenacious and tranquil; and I burst into a jarring laugh, remembering how he had stuck to the circus-rider woman—­the depth of passion under that placid surface, which even cuts with a riding-whip (so the legend had it) could never raffle into the semblance of a storm; something like the passion of a fish would be if one could imagine such a thing as a passionate fish.