time. At the door Mark looked back, but the General was not aware of his presence. His eyes were still misty, and seemed to stare at a far horizon. Mark closed the door very softly.
Despite Sean Courtney's promise to discuss Dirk Courtney's proposition again, long weeks went by without even the mention of his name. However, though the life at Ernoyeni seemed to continue in its busy round, yet there were times when Mark entered the panelled and booklined study to find the General brooding darkly at his desk, beak-nosed and morbid as some roosting bird of prey, and he withdrew quietly, respecting his melancholy, knowing he was still in mourning. Mark realized it would take time before he was ready to talk.
During this period there were small changes in Mark's own circumstances. One night, long after midnight, Sean Courtney had entered his dressing-room, to find the lights were still on in the bedroom and Ruth propped on her pillows and reading. You shouldn't have waited up for me, he told her severely. I could have slept on the couch, I prefer you here. She closed the book.
What are you reading? She showed him the title. D. H. Lawrence's new novel, Women in Love. Sean grinned as he unbuttoned his shirt. Did he teach you anything? Not yet, but I'm still hoping. She smiled at him, and he thought how young and lovely she looked in her lace nightdress. And you? Did you finish your speech? Yes. He sat to remove his boots. It's a masterpiece I'm going to tear the bastards to pieces. I heard Mark's motorcycle leaving a few minutes ago.
You kept him here until midnightHe was helping me look up some figures and searching Hansard for me. It's awfully late. He's young, grunted Sean. And dan-ined well paid for it. He picked up his boots and stumped through into the dressing-room, the limp more noticeable now that he was in his stockinged feet. And I haven't heard him complain yet. He came back in his night-shirt and slipped into bed beside her. If you are going to keep the poor boy to these hours, it's not fair to send him back to town every nightWhat do you suggest? he asked, as he wound his gold hunter and then placed it on the bedside table.
I could turn the gate-keeper's cottage into a flat for him.
It wouldn't need much, even though it's been deserted for years. Good idea, Sean agreed casually. Keep him onthepremises so I can really get some work out of him. You're a hard man, General Courtney. He rolled over and kissed her lingeringly, then whispered in her ear. I am glad you noticed. She giggled like a bride and whispered back, I didn't mean that. Let's see if we can teach you something that Mr Lawrence could not, he suggested.
The cottage, once it was repainted and furnished with discards from the big house, was by Mark's standards palatial, and marvellously free of vermin and cockroaches.
It was less than half a mile from the main house, and his hours became as irregular as those of his master, his position became more trusted and naturally integrated into the household. His duties came to cover the entire spectrum from speech-wTiting and researching, answering all correspondence that was not important enough for the General's own hand, operating the household accounts, to merely sitting quietly sometimes when Sean Courtney needed somebody to talk to, and acting as a sounding board for arguments and ideas.
Yet there was still time for his old love of reading. There were thousands of volumes that made up the library at Emoyeni and Mark took an armful of them down to the cottage each evening and readuntil the earlyhours, devouring with omnivorous appetite history, biography, satire, political treatise, Zone Grey, Kipling and Rider Haggard.
Then suddenly there was a new spirit of excitement and upheaval in Emoyeni as the next session of Parliament approached. This meant that the household must uproot itself, and move almost a thousand miles to Cape Town.
Lightly Ruth Courtney referred to this annual political migration as the Great Trek, but the description was justified, for it meant moving the family, fifteen of the senior servants, three automobiles, a dozen horses, all the clothing, silver, glassware, papers, books and other incidentals that would be necessary to sustain in the correct style a busy social and political season of many months, while General Courtney and his peers conducted the affairs of the nation. It meant also closing Emoyeni and opening the house in Newlands, below the squat bulk of Table Mountain.
In the middle of all this frantic activity, Storm Courtney arrived home from the grand tour of the British Isles and the Continent on which she and Irene Leuchars had been chaperoned by Irene's mother. In her last letter to Ruth Courtney, Mrs Leuchars had admitted herself to be both physically and mentally exhausted. You will never know, y dear, the terrible weight of responsibility I have been under. We have been followed across half the world by droves of eager young men, Americans, Italians, Frenchmen, Counts, Barons, sons of industrialists, and even the son of the dictator of a South American Republic. The strain was such that at one period I could bear it no longer and locked both girls in their room. It was only later that I discovered they had escaped by means of a fire escape and danced until the following morning at some disreputable bofte de nuit in Montparnasse. With the tact of a loving wife, Ruth refrained from showing the letter to Sean Courtney and so he prepared to welcome his daughter with all the enthusiasm of a doting father, unclouded by awareness of her recent escapades.
mark was for once left out of the family preparations and he watched from the library window when Sean handed his wife into the Rolls. He was dressed like a suitor in crisply starched fly-away collar, a gay silk cravat, dark blue suit with white carnation in the button-hole and a beaver tilted jauntily over one eye; his beard was trimmed and shamed and there was a merry anticipatory sparkle in his eyes, and he twirled his cane lightly as he went round to his own seat.
The Rolls purred away, almost two hours ahead of the time when the mailship was scheduled to berth at No. 1 wharf. It was followed at a respectful distance by the second Rolls which would be needed for the conveyance of Storm Courtney's baggage.
Mark lunched alone in the study and then worked on, but his concentration was broken by the imminent arrival of the returning cavalcade, and when it came, he hurried to the windows.
He caught only a glimpse of Storm as she left the car and danced up the front steps hand in hand with her mother.
They were followed immediately by the General, his cane snapping a staccato beat off the marble as he hurried to match their swiftness; on his face he wore an expression that tried to remain severe and stern but kept breaking into a wide beaming grin.
Mark heard the laughter and the excited murmur of the servants assembled to greet her in the entrance hall, and Storm's voice giving a new sweet tilt to the cadence of the Zulu language as she went to each of them in turn.
Mark returned to his open books, but did not look down at them. Instead he was savouring that one glimpse he had of Storm.
She had grown somehow lovelier, he had not believed it possible, but it had happened. It was as though the divine essence of young womanhood had been distilled in her, all the gaiety and grace, all the warmth and
