mself alone, he sat down on a low wall
quite near to her and stared gloomily at the ground. Diana, not a
little amused, surveyed him at her leisure. "What in the world," she
wondered, "was this smart, soldierly looking man, correctly booted and
spurred, sitting down there for in the ruins?..."

The great temple at Zimbabwe has never been roofed. The ruins consist
of a wonderful outer wall, from twenty-two to thirty-two feet high and
in some places fifteen feet thick, of an elongated shape, and within
this wall are remnants of other walls which formed separate small
enclosures. There is also the sacred enclosure with the conical tower,
and leading into it from the north entrance the wonderfully contrived
passage, between two high walls, scarcely more than a shoulder's
breadth apart in one place. Amid the ruins trees have grown up, many
of them higher than the outer wall, and these shade the glare of the
sun, casting cool shadows and networks of sunlight upon the broken
walls. And on the afternoon in question here and there were splashes
of brilliant scarlet, where a Kaffir Boom tree flowered with a
flaunting indifference to the passing of centuries and races.

Diana, with her whimsical, artistic temperament, was fully alive to
the fascination and uniqueness of her surroundings, but being a little
tired with the drive, she felt for the moment somewhat impatient with
ruins generally, and just a shade depressed with a certain air of dead
forlornness that hovered all around. Then into the midst of this dream
of antiquity strode a stern, fierce-looking, very up-to-date
sportsman, who sat, for no conceivable reason, on a broken wall and
stared at the ground. For one moment her sense of the ludicrous made
her almost laugh aloud. Then, with sudden, upleaping interest, she sat
still as a mouse and watched him. Once she half smiled to herself.
There was a man, then, as well as a boy! She was not going to be
entirely stifled in ruins, after all! She went on with her
cogitations, staring hard, her head a little to one side. A real man,
too, with a lean, brown face, and a square, determined chin, and a
nose quite Roman enough to suit any novelist, and dark hair a little
thin on the top and a little grey at the temples. She could not be
sure if he were a soldier or not, but evidently he had been riding,
for he still carried a hunting-crop; and also, judging by his face and
attitude, something was considerably on his mind.

Without