on the shadowy darkness and her work in her lap. And the
Dutchman, gazing, felt with a sort of fierce reluctance that there
were no women in the world for calmness and strength quite like the
Englishwomen, nor more delicately, entrancingly fair.

Then, suddenly, Meryl heard her name and looked up.

"Why in the world do you want to go to Rhodesia?" he had said; and
Diana answered, "I don't know that we do want to go; but Meryl has
suddenly developed into a violent Imperialist, and we go at her
desire."

"What to do?" and he asked the question a little sharply of the dark
eyes now turned to theirs. Quite suddenly and unaccountably he
resented their going; resented, at any rate, that she, Meryl, should
go. There had been so much "Rhodesia" of late. Everyone seemed bitten
with a kind of silly craze for the place. Now it was gold; now it was
land; now it was union or no union; now it was annexation and "twenty
pieces of silver"; such a lot of fuss about some square miles of
wilderness, containing odd outcrops of gold-bearing reef.

"There is nothing worth seeing in Rhodesia, except the Victoria
Falls," he asserted; "and you can run up there and see all you want to
and get back in a week!" And still he looked enquiringly at Meryl.

"We want to see the people," she said, half turning. "The pioneers,
who went first to investigate, the settlers who followed, the women
who went forward with their husbands into the wilderness."

He got off the table and came and leaned against a verandah-post
beside her with folded arms, looking down. "But that is what you won't
see; how should you? You will only see dusty, upstart towns, with
horrible corrugated-iron hotels, where you will swelter in heat and
flies and eat abominable tinned stuffs. It is a barren, comfortless
land at present, with a possibility of being useful some day. They
want money, energy, brains to develop it thoroughly; and they won't
accept them when they are offered, because a few stiff-necked
Englishmen happen to be in power. It is absurd to go there at present.
You will only get typhoid and malaria, and be excruciatingly
uncomfortable."

"It sounds a pretty rotten sort of place! What do you and your
colleagues want it for so badly, anyway?..." asked Diana, throwing her
head back and narrowing her eyes as she looked at him with a shrewd
questioning air.

He coloured slightly under the sunburn on his cheeks. "We want a
United South Africa. Why should one countr