in attractive quality of
humility that was hers kept April's heart sweet, she was sometimes in
danger of becoming slightly _tete montee_. But she always pinched
herself in time, with the reminder that it was all only a dream from
which she must awaken very soon. For the nineteen halcyon days of the
voyage were speeding by and coming to an end. Hot, hard blue skies
gleamed overhead, and at night came the moon of Africa, pearl-white
instead of amber-coloured, as it looks in Europe. Strange stars
appeared, too, bigger, more lustrous, than the stars of cooler climes,
and seeming to brood very low over the world. The "Milky Way" was a path
of powdered silver. The "Coal Sack" showed itself full of brilliant
jewels. And the Southern Cross! When April first saw it mystically
scrolled across the heavens, like a device upon the shield azure of some
celestial Galahad, its magic fell across her soul, and would not be
lifted.

This is one of the first spells Africa puts upon those whom she means to
make her own. Ever after, with the poignant memory of that Cross of
straggling stars there is a thought of Africa, and the two cannot be torn
apart. For April there was always to be a memory of Vereker Sarle, too,
associated with it, for he it was who first picked out the Cross for her
in the luminant heavens, and he it was who said to her on the night
before they reached Cape Town:

"There seems to be some kind of blessing in that old Cross held out over
us as we come trailing back."

After that first day at Madeira she had not seen a great deal of Vereker
Sarle. He had dropped back quietly from the crowd that ringed her in,
and become a looker-on, sometimes barely that, for he was a great
poker-player, and spent much time in the smoke-room with one or two
hard-looking citizens who were plainly not drawing-room ornaments. April
had missed him, with a little pain in her heart, for instinct told her
that he was one of the men who count in the world. Also, she had divined
that his heart was as clear as his eyes. Though his face was so scarred
and rugged as to inspire in the wit of the ship the jest that it had been
chewed at by one of the lions he had hunted, there was yet something in
it that suggested the gentleness of a child, and that knight-like
chivalry that she had sought but never found in any man. So it hurt her
a little when she thought of it in the night hours, that he should keep
aloof from her, yet in a way sh