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"Well if you must have it! He has gone." "Gone!" she repeated. "What do you mean by that?" He looked down into her whitening face, and his own grew sterner. "Just what I say. He cleared out yesterday morning early. No one knows where he is." Sylvia's hand unconsciously pressed her heart. It was beating very violently. She spoke with a great effort. "Perhaps he has gone to Ritzen to look for me."
She started up, facing him, a sudden sharp misgiving at her heart. "Burke! You! Where is Dr. Kieff?" He uttered a grim, exultant sound that made her quiver. "He is on his way back to Ritzen or Brennerstadt. He didn't mention which." "Ah!" Her hands were tightly clasped upon her breast. "What what have you done to him?" she panted. Burke had risen to his feet.
And it was that certainty which had sent her from his empty hut on the sand in pursuit of him, daring all to win him back ere he had sunk too deep for deliverance. She had ridden to Ritzen by way of the Vreiboom's farm, half-expecting to find Guy there. But she had seen only Kieff and Piet Vreiboom.
Whenever in after days Sylvia looked back upon her marriage, it seemed to be wrapped in a species of hazy dream like the early mists on that far-off range of hills. They did not go again to Ritzen, but to a town of greater importance further down the line, a ride of nearly forty miles across the veldt.
For surely ah, surely, if she knew him he had begun already to repent in burning shame and self-loathing. He must have ridden all the way to Brennerstadt, for he was not at Ritzen. Ritzen was not a place to hide in. Would she find him at Brennerstadt? There were only two hotels there, and Kieff had said he would stop at one of them.
"Faith, I'll do it when I get to Brennerstadt," he said to himself vindictively. "But it's friends first, eh, Burke, my lad? Ah, Burke, my boy, friends first!" Was it only a few months since last she had looked out over the barren veldt from the railway at Ritzen? It seemed to Sylvia like half a lifetime.
He was very considerate for her, making every possible provision for her comfort, but his manner was aloof, almost forbidding. There was no intimacy between them, no confidence, no comradeship. They reached Ritzen in the late afternoon. Burke suggested spending the night there, but she urged him to continue the journey. The heat of the day was over; there was no reason for lingering.
In her disgust she had ridden swiftly on without stopping to ascertain if Guy had gone to Ritzen or had decided to ride the whole forty miles to Brennerstadt. The lateness of the hour, however, had decided her to make for the former place since she knew she could get a train there on the following morning and she could not face the long journey at night alone on the veldt.
"You heard what your Boer friend called me," she said. "He wouldn't understand anything else." "I told him to call you that," said Burke. "You told him!" She gave a great start. His words amazed her. "Yes." There was a dogged quality in his answer. "I had to protect you somehow. He had seen us together at Ritzen. I said you were my wife." Sylvia gasped in speechless astonishment.
It was from the street that he had spied her, and the sight of her piteous, white face with its deeply shadowed eyes had gone straight to his impulsive Irish heart. "No," she said. "We are not bothering about the diamond. I think we shall probably start back to Ritzen to-night." "Ah now, ye might stay one day longer and try your luck," wheedled the Irishman. "The Fates would be sure to favour ye.
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