‘It was.  For so I met you.’

He released her hands, and she sank into the nearest chair.  Drake walked to the window and stood facing the sunlight, breathing it in.  ‘Clarice,’ she heard him murmur, with a shake of his shoulders like a great Newfoundland dog; and then the cry of a newspaper boy shouting the headlines of a special edition rasped into the room.

Drake leaned out of the window.  ‘Hi!’ he called, and tossed a penny into the street.

‘Threepence,’ shouted the boy from below.

‘It’s a penny paper,’ cried Drake.

’Threepence.  There’s a corner in ’em.’

Clarice listened to the argument.  Most men, she thought helplessly, don’t buy newspapers the moment they have been accepted, and, at all events, it is an occasion when they are disposed to throw their money about.  It made no difference of any kind to him.

Drake finally got the better of the bargain, and the paper was brought up to the room.  Clarice saw Drake open it hurriedly, and his face cloud and harden as he glanced down the column.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked in a rising voice.

‘A rebellion in Matanga,’ he said slowly.  ’I thought that danger was averted,’ and there was a distinct note of self-reproach in his tone.

Clarice felt her heart beat quicker.  She rose from her chair.  ’What does that mean to you?’ she asked.

‘Delay,’ he replied, with the self-reproach yet more accentuated.  ‘Nothing more, I am sure; but it does mean that.’

‘Nothing more?’

He noticed an expression of disappointment upon the girl’s face, and, mistaking it, repeated, ‘Nothing more than that, Clarice.’  He took a step towards her.  ’Of course I ought not to have spoken to you yet,—­not until everything was settled.  I am sorry—­of course it will come out all right, only till then it wasn’t fair.  I didn’t mean to,—­not even when I came this afternoon.  But seeing you,—­I wasn’t strong enough,—­I gave in.’

Clarice felt a pulse of satisfaction, and her lips shaped to a smile.

‘Ah, you don’t regret it,’ he exclaimed, and the look of humiliation passed from his face.  ‘Your father’s in the library,’ he went on; ’I had better go and tell him.  Shall I go alone, or will you come with me?’

‘No, you go; I will wait here.’

She stood alone in the centre of the room while Drake went downstairs, staring fixedly in front of her.  Once or twice she set her hands to her forehead and drew them down her flushed cheeks.  Then she walked to the window.  There was something floating on the edge of her mind, just eluding her.  A thought was it, or a phrase?  If a phrase, who had spoken it?  She began to remember; it was something Stephen Drake had said, but about what?  And then, in a flash, her recollection defined it for her.  It was about moonlight being absorbed into the darkness of an African veld, just soaking into it like water