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Isn't it enough that you know she could love you as a Rhodesian soldier-policeman? Why torture yourself unnecessarily?" "If I were only a Rhodesian policeman I should not have come." She looked at him with quick curiosity. Then something had happened! There really was some great change in him. He smiled into her questioning eyes. "Then Mrs. Grenville did not tell you?"
The chief members of the Commission, men of note and weight, wondered a little over this distinguished-looking man, merely a soldier-policeman, who knew such an extraordinary amount about the black races in Rhodesia; but if they sought enlightenment they were disappointed.
He sat on her left, while Lord Elmsleigh, who was passing through from the Victoria Falls, sat on her right; and though she chatted lightly to his lordship, she was conscious every second of the hour of the big, silent, rather grim soldier-policeman. He spoke very little.
There won't be no war unless somebody starts somethin'. Hey, there, buddy, would ye smoke a God's-country cigarette if I give ye one?" "Si," grinned the soldier-policeman, all animosity gone. And as the other two men tramped away through the mud they also grinned, looking back at the North and the South American pacing side by side in sentry-go, blowing smoke and conversing like brothers in arms.
"Major Carew, when he is here, loves just to sit and look at it," and in her fancy she saw the silent, watching form of the grim soldier-policeman. "He is an interesting man," she said simply. "I think I understood he was some connection of yours?" "You mean Major Carew?
How it appealed to her, how it enthralled her senses, how it made her ache with a great overwhelming desire to discover quickly what "doing" in a big sense there might be for her! Of course he, the stern soldier-policeman, was of the fearless band.
The wedding he so dreaded was safely prevented, but would the happiness come back?... the happiness that had been in that household before they went to Rhodesia? Could all his love and hope and tenderness bring back joy to the eyes that were his heaven and his earth? "Dearie," murmured Diana again, "was she crying because of that big soldier-policeman up north?"
And yet, sometimes in the silence of the night, how her spirit shuddered and shrank from it, lying bare and desolate and bleeding under the hopeless, unconquerable ache for that strong Englishman in the north that soldier-policeman for whom she would willingly have foregone all pride of place, all luxury of wealth, all satisfaction of achievement!
He had said that they should continue to eat twice each day, and therefore his departure was a matter of no moment. They knew only that he had gone southward with the man of the soldier-police. This was doubtless as he had commanded. They could conceive of MacNair only as commanding. Therefore the soldier-policeman had obeyed and accompanied him to the southward.
It did not seem very polite, but she hardly looked at it in that way. Somehow, with this stern-featured soldier-policeman, the ordinary amenities of conventional intercourse seemed to have little weight. If he regretted his words and did not want to go, she liked him better for calmly remaining away, than coming against his wish, because he felt he ought.
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