Lynch, and she had lived an interesting
life from a certain point of view. In her girlhood she had fluttered the
hearts of many besides Cousin Edward Pierson, and at eighteen had made
a passionate love match with a good-looking young Indian civilian, named
Fane. They had loved each other to a standstill in twelve months. Then
had begun five years of petulance, boredom, and growing cynicism, with
increasing spells of Simla, and voyages home for her health which was
really harmed by the heat. All had culminated, of course, in another
passion for a rifleman called Lynch. Divorce had followed, remarriage,
and then the Boer War, in which he had been badly wounded. She had gone
out and nursed him back to half his robust health, and, at twenty-eight,
taken up life with him on an up-country farm in Cape Colony. This middle
period had lasted ten years, between the lonely farm and an old Dutch
house at High Constantia. Lynch was not a bad fellow, but, like most
soldiers of the old Army, had been quite carefully divested of an
aesthetic sense. And it was Leila's misfortune to have moments when
aesthetic sense seemed necessary. She had struggled to overcome
this weakness, and that other weakness of hers--a liking for men's
admiration; but there had certainly been intervals when she had not
properly succeeded. Her acquaintance with Jimmy Fort had occurred during
one of these intervals, and when he went back to England so abruptly,
she had been feeling very tenderly towards him. She still remembered him
with a certain pleasure. Before Lynch died, these "intervals" had been
interrupted by a spell of returning warmth for the invalided man to whom
she had joined her life under the romantic conditions of divorce. He had
failed, of course, as a farmer, and his death left her with nothing but
her own settled income of a hundred and fifty pounds a year. Faced by
the prospect of having almost to make her living, at thirty-eight, she
felt but momentary dismay--for she had real pluck. Like many who have
played with amateur theatricals, she fancied herself as an actress;
but, after much effort, found that only her voice and the perfect
preservation of her legs were appreciated by the discerning managers
and public of South Africa; and for three chequered years she made face
against fortune with the help of them, under an assumed name. What she
did--keeping a certain bloom of refinement, was far better than the
achievements of many more respectabl