!" and a young native appeared from the enclosure containing the
conical huts. He was tall and slim, and straight as a dart, and had a
pleasing face.

"Come with me," said Lamont, speaking the Sindabele very fairly; "I am
going down to the river bank to collect a few birds for the pot. You
shall carry them."

"_Nkose_!" sung out the boy with great heartiness.

The South African native is a born sportsman, and if there is a service
congenial to him it is the participation, even vicariously, in any form
of sport.

They strolled leisurely down among the tree-stems by the river bank.
The francolin, or bush pheasant, whirred up out of the tall tambuti
grass one or two at a time. Crack! crack! went the gun, and in less
than half an hour Lamont's cartridges, of which he had taken ten, were
exhausted, and Zingela was carrying nine birds as they retraced their
steps homeward.

"Cook them all, Zingela. The other _Inkosi_ will be home to-night, and
will be hungry." Then as the boy, with a murmur of assent, withdrew,
Lamont dropped into one of the cane chairs on the low stoep, beneath the
projecting verandah of thatch, and lit a pipe.

The sun sank lower and lower, and the evening light became more golden
and entrancing. It was an hour and a scene to promote meditation,
retrospection, and he did not want retrospection. Still it was there.
Like most things we don't want, it would intrude. The influence of his
recent dream was still upon him, and from it there was no getting away.

Rather more than a year ago, and Violet Courtland had indignantly, and
in public, branded him as a coward. He had striven to put the incident
from his mind and her and her recollection from his life--and had mostly
succeeded. There were times when her recollection would be forced back
upon him, though such occasions were becoming rarer and their effect
fainter. Every occasion of the kind had been succeeded by a fierce
reaction of vindictive rancour against one who could so have misjudged
him, and so would this. Yet it was more vivid, more saturating, than
any of them.

"Not if she went on her knees to me would I ever forgive her that one
thing," he would say fiercely to himself on the occasion of such
reactions, thus unconsciously paraphrasing the very words that had been
said about him, more than a year ago, and upwards of seven thousand
miles away. And there would occur to him the idea that life here was
too easy, too stagnant. Ye