My investigations were a barren business.  I used to go down to the village in the afternoon and sit in an out-of-the-way cafe, talking slow German with peasants and hotel porters, but there was little to learn.  I knew all there was to hear about the Pink Chalet, and that was nothing.  A young man who ski-ed stayed for three nights and spent his days on the alps above the fir-woods.  A party of four, including two women, was reported to have been there for a night—­all ramifications of the rich family of Basle.  I studied the house from the lake, which should have been nicely swept into ice-rinks, but from lack of visitors was a heap of blown snow.  The high old walls of the back part were built straight from the water’s edge.  I remember I tried a short cut through the grounds to the high-road and was given ‘Good afternoon’ by a smiling German manservant.  One way and another I gathered there were a good many serving-men about the place—­too many for the infrequent guests.  But beyond this I discovered nothing.

Not that I was bored, for I had always Peter to turn to.  He was thinking a lot about South Africa, and the thing he liked best was to go over with me every detail of our old expeditions.  They belonged to a life which he could think about without pain, whereas the war was too near and bitter for him.  He liked to hobble out-of-doors after the darkness came and look at his old friends, the stars.  He called them by the words they use on the veld, and the first star of morning he called the voorlooper—­the little boy who inspans the oxen—­a name I had not heard for twenty years.  Many a great yarn we spun in the long evenings, but I always went to bed with a sore heart.  The longing in his eyes was too urgent, longing not for old days or far countries, but for the health and strength which had once been his pride.

One night I told him about Mary.

‘She will be a happy mysie,’ he said, ’but you will need to be very clever with her, for women are queer cattle and you and I don’t know their ways.  They tell me English women do not cook and make clothes like our vrouws, so what will she find to do?  I doubt an idle woman will be like a mealie-fed horse.’

It was no good explaining to him the kind of girl Mary was, for that was a world entirely beyond his ken.  But I could see that he felt lonelier than ever at my news.  So I told him of the house I meant to have in England when the war was over—­an old house in a green hilly country, with fields that would carry four head of cattle to the Morgan and furrows of clear water, and orchards of plums and apples.  ‘And you will stay with us all the time,’ I said.  ’You will have your own rooms and your own boy to look after you, and you will help me to farm, and we will catch fish together, and shoot the wild ducks when they come up from the pans in the evening.  I have found a better countryside than the Houtbosch, where you and I planned to have a farm.  It is a blessed and happy place, England.’