It was the first time in her knowledge that he had ever asserted himself.  Mrs. Ingleton stared at him wildly for a second or two, then, seeing that he was in earnest, subsided into a chair with a burst of hysterical weeping, declaring that no one ever treated her so brutally before.

She expected to be soothed, comforted, propitiated, but no word of solace came.  Finally she looked round with an indignant dabbing of her tears.  How dare he treat her thus?  Was he quite heartless?  She began to utter a stream of reproaches, but stopped short and gasped in incredulous disgust.  He had actually—­he had actually—­gone, and left her to wear her emotion out in solitude.

So overwhelming was the result of this piece of neglect, combined with the failure of all her plans, that Mrs. Ingleton retired forwith to bed, and remained there for the rest of the day.

CHAPTER VI

THE LAND OF STRANGERS

It had been a day of intense and brooding heat.  Black clouds hung sullenly low in the sky, and a heavy gloom obscured the face of the earth.  On each side of the railway the veldt stretched for miles, vivid green, yet strangely desolate to unaccustomed eyes.  The moving train seemed the only sign of life in all that wilderness.

Sylvia leaned from the carriage window and gazed blankly forth.  She had hoped that Guy would meet her at Cape Town, but he had not been there.  She had come unwelcomed into this land of strangers.  But he would be at Ritzen.  He had cabled a month before that he would meet her there if he could not get to Cape Town.

And now she was nearing Ritzen.  Across the mysterious desolation she discerned its many lights.  It was a city in a plain, and the far hills mounted guard around it, but she saw them only dimly in the failing light.

Ritzen was the nearest railway station to the farm on which Guy worked.  From here she would have to travel twenty miles across country.  But that would not be yet.  Guy and she would be married first.  There would be a little breathing-space at Ritzen before she went into that new life that awaited her beyond the hills.  Somehow she felt as if those hills guarded her destiny.  She did not fear the future, but she looked forward to it with a certain awe.

Paramount within her, was the desire for Guy, the sight of his handsome, debonair countenance, the ring of his careless laugh.  As soon as she saw Guy she knew she would be at home, even in the land of strangers, as she had never been at the Manor since the advent of her father’s second wife.  She had no misgivings on that point, or she had never come across the world to him thus, making all return impossible.  For there could be be no going back for her.  She had taken a definite and irrevocable step.  There could be no turning back upon this road that she had chosen.