"No."
"I supposed you had taken the voyage any number of times. But about
the seasons, it doesn't count for much until you come to Christmas.
No England-born mortal can hang up his stocking in mid-summer
without a pang of regretful homesickness."
Weldon laughed.
"Do you substitute a refrigerator for a chimney corner?" he asked.
"But are you England-born?"
"Yes. My father went out only seven years ago. The 'home' tradition
is so strong that I was sent back to school and for a year of social
life. My little brother goes to Harrow in two years. Even in Cape
Town, a few people still hold true to the tradition of the public
school."
Weldon nodded assent.
"We meet it in Canada, now and then; not too often, though. So in
reality you are almost as much a stranger to Cape Town as I am."
"Quite. My father says it is all changed now. It used to be a lazy
little place; now it is pandemonium, soldiers and supplies going
out, time-expired men and invalids coming in. Mr. Weldon--"
His questioning smile answered the pause in her sentence.
"Well?" he asked, after a prolonged interval.
Her teeth shut on her lower lip, she stared at the wide blue sea
with wide blue eyes. Something in its restless tossing, in the
changing lights that darted back to her from the crests of the
waves, seemed to be holding her in an hypnotic trance. Out of the
midst of the trance she spoke again, and it was plain to Weldon, as
he listened to her low, intent voice, that her thoughts were not
upon the sea nor yet upon him.
"It ought to terrify me," she said. "I mean the war, of course. I
ought to dread the going out into the atmosphere of it. I don't.
Sometimes I think I must have fighting blood in my veins. Instead of
being frightened at what my father writes me, I feel stirred by it
all, as if I were ready for anything. I went out to Aldershot, one
day last year; but that was only so many dainty frills, so much
playing soldier. That's not what I mean at all." Turning suddenly,
she looked up directly into Weldon's dark gray eyes. "One of my
cousins wants to be a nurse. She lives at Piquetberg Road, but she
has been visiting friends who live in Natal on the edge of the
fighting, where she has seen things as they happen. In her last
letter, she told me that she was only waiting for my uncle's
permission to go out as a nurse."
"Is that what you would do?"
Her head lifted itself proudly.
"No. She can take care of the wounded men, if she chooses. For my
part, I'd rather cheer on the men who are starting for the front. If
I could know that one man, one single man, fought the better for
having known me, I should feel as if I had done my share."
She spoke with fiery vigor; then her eyes dropped again to the
dancing waves. When at length she spoke again, she was once more the
level-voiced English girl who sat next him at the table.
"You are going out to Cape Town to stay, Mr. Weldon?" she asked,
with an accent so utterly conventional that Weldon almost doubted
his own ears.
"To stay until the war ends," he replied, in an accent as
conventional as her own.
"In Cape Town?" Then she felt her eyes drawn to meet his eyes, as he
answered quietly,--
"I shall do my best to make myself a place in the firing line."
Again her conventionality vanished, and she gave him her hand, as if
to seal a compact.
"I hope you will win it and hold it," she responded slowly. "I can
wish you nothing better."