ver
to-day. And--here you are."

"But you didn't think I should go without seeing you again, child?"

"Of course not. But it would have been one of those hurried snatched
meetings in the veldt. Well now I have got you all to myself, and I
will keep you. Come. We will have a last long walk alone together
while they are in there."

The while the thought was hammering in her brain, that to-morrow at the
same time all would be as it was now; no shadow of a difference in
anything around but--he would be gone.

"I won't keep you waiting a moment," she said, her fingers intertwined
in his as she rose. "We will go before they come out."

Wyvern, left there even for that "moment," could not help blessing the
luck that had brought Warren over to Seven Kloofs the night before, to
talk him into coming to bid good-bye to Le Sage as if nothing had
happened. As Lalante had said, they would have managed a final and
farewell meeting; but as she had also said, it would have been a
snatched and hurried one.

True to her word she reappeared in a moment, looking her best and
sweetest; and that was very good to look at indeed. And they went
forth, down the way they knew so well, the way they had so often trodden
together, and the voices of the gladsome, sunlit _veldt_ made music as
they went.

"Oh, darling," said the girl, as she leaned heavily upon the arm passed
through hers, and upon his shoulder. "However am I going to get through
the time without you--day after day, week after week, even month after
month, and know that you are hundreds of miles from me, after this
year--this whole year--when we have been all in all to each other? Tell
me--again. No one has ever been to you as I have? Tell me. I will
feed on it after you have--gone."

Her hungry, passionate accents thrilled his every fibre, then his arms
were around her in a close embrace.

"Lalante--my own love--my one and only love, I could go on telling you
the same thing. No one has ever been to me as you have been or ever
could be. You know how from the time our eyes first met we knew we were
made for each other, and it was not long before we proved it to be so."

"Yes, I know. I was thinking of that all this morning, was bathing
myself in a very day-dream of our time together. And now, you are
leaving me."

"Oh, sweet--don't put that tone--that hopeless tone--into it. I am
leaving you only to come back to you. You know that there is no one
like yo