"You are dull, dear boy," she remarked, as she caught the box of matches which Lawless tossed her in silence. "You are a man of action, and the solitudes are not to your taste. This life is the silly sort of mistake made by most honeymooners." Lawless looked across at her, a queer expression in his eyes. In the dim light, which mercifully concealed the thickness of the paint upon her face, she was really strikingly handsome. She looked younger than she appeared in the daytime. "You ought always to sit in the twilight," he said with brutal frankness. She laughed good-naturedly. "If you pay me compliments like that, Hughie, you'll make me vain," she said. She drew at her cigarette, inhaling the smoke and discharging it through her nostrils. He watched her with an odd feeling of disgust. The bond between them was peculiar. The affection was without doubt stronger on her side than on his. But he ungrudgingly admitted she made a man a capital chum; and since throwing in his lot with hers he was keenly alive to the fact that many men envied him his possession. It had been a source of much annoyance to him, and of great gratification to Tottie, that she had been the object of offensive admiration at every place they visited. She had declared that it was because he was jealous that he determined to bury her in the wilds of the veld. "You are the type of man who would be capable of murdering a woman, Grit," she said. "There you are mistaken," he had answered. "If a woman once washed her hands of me, I should simply have done with her." "One can't turn one's back on an incident so as to forget it altogether," she had objected. "For the matter of that," he had returned, "a man can't command memory, but he can so put a thing out of mind that it ceases to disturb him." "Then, if ever I chance to elope with Van Bleit," Tottie had flung at him audaciously, "I shall have the satisfaction of knowing my memory is relegated to the ashbin..." They sat on until the light failed and darkness settled upon the veld, closing about them stealthily, and shutting out the immensity of the endless stretch of treeless waste that was all that could be seen from the house, a wide expanse of undulating veld held in the blue hollow of the sky. The darkness crept closer. It shut out the face of each from the other's view. A small red glow marked where Tottie still held a cigarette between her painted lips, and a larger duller glow shone from the bowl of Lawless' pipe. "The moon will be up in a short while," he said abruptly, and the words, quietly as he had spoken, snapped the silence almost violently, as a voice raised above a whisper in a death-chamber might do. "Shall we stay and see it rise?" "Yes, if you like." She flung the end of her cigarette out into the darkness, and watched it where it lay like a somewhat fiery glow-worm until it smouldered out.