“Well, I don’t know,” he rejoined, admiration unbounded in his eyes for the picture she was of maidenly charm and womanly beauty, “I should say that goodness was a more wonderful thing.  But power is the most common ambition, and only a handful of the hundreds of millions get it in any large way.  I used to feel it tremendously when I first heard the stamps pounding the quartz in the mills on the Rand.  You never heard that sound?  In the clear height of that plateau the air reverberates greatly; and there’s nothing on earth which so much gives a sense of power—­power that crushes—­as the stamps of a great mine pounding away night and day.  There they go, thundering on, till it seems to you that some unearthly power is hammering the world into shape.  You get up and go to the window and look out into the night.  There’s the deep blue sky—­blue like nothing you ever saw in any other sky, and the stars so bright and big, and so near, that you feel you could reach up and pluck one with your hand; and just over the little hill are the lights of the stamp-mills, the smoke and the mad red flare, the roar of great hammers as they crush, crush, crush; while the vibration of the earth makes you feel that you are living in a world of Titans.”

“And when it all stops?” she asked, almost breathlessly.  “When the stamps pound no more, and the power is withdrawn?  It is empty and desolate—­and frightening?”

“It is anything you like.  If all the mills all at once, with the thousands of stamps on the Rand reef, were to stop suddenly, and the smoke and the red flare were to die, it would be frightening in more ways than one.  But I see what you mean.  There might be a sense of peace, but the minds and bodies which had been vibrating with the stir of power would feel that the soul had gone out of things, and they would dwindle too.”

“If Rhodes should fall, if the stamps on the Rand should cease—?”

He got to his feet.  “Either is possible, maybe probable; and I don’t want to think of it.  As you say, there’d be a ghastly sense of emptiness and a deadly kind of peace.”  He smiled bitterly.

She rose now also, and fingering some flowers in a vase, arranging them afresh, said:  “Well, this Jameson Raid, if it is proved that Cecil Rhodes is mixed up in it, will it injure you greatly—­I mean your practical interests?”

He stood musing for a moment.  “It’s difficult to say at this distance.  One must be on the spot to make a proper estimate.  Anything may happen.”

She was evidently anxious to ask him a question, but hesitated.  At last she ventured, and her breath came a little shorter as she spoke.

“I suppose you wish you were in South Africa now.  You could do so much to straighten things out, to prevent the worst.  The papers say you have a political mind—­the statesman’s intelligence, the Times said.  That letter you wrote, that speech you made at the Chamber of Commerce dinner—­”