She took out a match and struck it without speaking.  There was something poignant in her silence.  She was standing again in the wintry dark of her father’s park, pressed close to Guy’s heart, and begging him brokenly to use that little parting gift of hers with thoughts of her when more than half the world lay between them.  Guy’s cigarette was in his mouth.  She stooped forward to light it.  Her hand was trembling.  In a moment he reached up, patted it lightly, and took the match from her fingers.  The action said more than words.  It was as if he had gently turned a page in the book of life, and bade her not to look back.

“Now don’t you bother about me!” he said.  “I’m being good—­as you see.  So go and cook the dinner or do anything else that appeals to your housekeeper’s soul!  That is, if you feel it’s immoral to smoke a cigarette at this early hour.  Needless to say, I shall be charmed if you will join me.”

But he did not mean to talk upon intimate subjects, and his tone conveyed as much.  She lingered for a while, and they spoke of the farm, the cattle, Burke’s prospects, everything under the sun save personal matters.  Yet there was no barrier in their reserve.  They avoided these by tacit consent.

In the end she left him, feeling strangely comforted.  Burke had been right.  The devil had gone out of Guy, and he had come back.

She pondered the matter as she went about her various tasks, but she found no solution thereof.  Something must have happened to cause the change in him; she could not believe that Kieff’s departure had effected it.  Her thoughts went involuntarily to Burke—­Burke whose wrath had been so terrible the previous night.  Was it due to him?  Had he accomplished what neither Kieff’s skill nor her devotion had been able to achieve?  Yet he had spoken of Guy as one of his failures.  He had impressed upon her the fact that Guy’s, case was hopeless.  She had even been convinced of it herself until to-day.  But to-day all things were changed.  Guy had come back.

The thought of her next meeting with Burke tormented her continually, checking all gladness.  She dreaded it unspeakably, listening for him with nerves on edge during the busy hours that followed.

She made the Kaffir boy bring the camp-bed out of the guest-hut which Burke had occupied of late and set it up in a corner of Guy’s room.  Kieff had slept on a long-chair in the sitting-room, taking his rest at odd times and never for any prolonged spell.  She had even wondered sometimes if he ever really slept at all, so alert had he been at the slightest sound.  But she knew that Burke hated the long-chair because it creaked at every movement, and she was determined that he should not spend another night on the floor.  So, while with trepidation she awaited him, she made such preparations as she could for his comfort.

Joe, the house-boy, was very clumsy in all his ways, and Guy, looking on, seemed to derive considerable amusement from his performance.  “I always did like Joe,” he remarked.  “There’s something about his mechanism that is irresistibly comic.  Oh, do leave him alone, Sylvia!  Let him arrange the thing upside down if he wants to!”