The life was killing him, brutalizing him. He lost even interest in the Kaffir boy’s education, which had not been without its light side of amusement. Hour after hour he would sit, on summer nights, on the doorstep of his shed, pipe in mouth, elbows on knees, thinking of nothing, his mind a dull blank. Now and then he thought of Yvonne, but only in a vague, far-off way. He never wrote or felt urged to write. What was the good? And he had received no letter from Yvonne since the one that had accompanied her line to Noakes. Once, several months afterwards, one of the ox-waggons from the town had been overturned in a swollen river, and many stores including the mail had been swept away. The driver told him there had been letters for him. Possibly one from Yvonne. At the time he regretted it, but his morbid indifferentism had already begun to darken his mind. He laid conjecture dully aside. The weeks and months passed and, with all his other longings for sweeter things, the desire for her letters died. And so the last strand wore through of the last thread that bound him to England. As for the novel, he had long since ceased to concern himself about its fate. Probably it had been lost in transit, either going or returning. The yellow sheets on which he had written the first draft lay on the mud floor in the corner of his hut and rotted and grew mildewed with the damp. At last, one day, like a bolt from the blue, came the publishers’ letter, offering alternative terms for the book, the usual royalty the firm paid to unknown authors, or eighty pounds down for the copyright, to be paid on publication. It aroused him, with a shock, from his torpor. That night he could not sleep. He got up and wandered about the veldt through the dewy grasses, under the bright African starlight, his veins alive with a new excitement. Perhaps he had found a vocation--one to bring him money, congenial work, the right at last to take his forfeited place in a civilised land. He returned to the house at daybreak, worn out with fatigue, but throbbing with wild schemes for the future. And the following evening, as soon as the toil of the day was over, he lit his small, smoking lamp, and sat down in feverish haste to begin a new story, the scheme of which he had half-heartedly worked out soon after Noakes’s death. The copyright of the other he sold for the eighty pounds. And then gradually the longing for England grew more insistent, until at last it took the form of a settled determination. One day he saddled a rough farm-pony and rode to the good Samaritan who had taken him in during his illness. The farmer, a hard-headed Scotchman, shook his head dubiously when Joyce unfolded his plan. “Stick to the farm and buy Wilson out. You ’ll mak’ more money, and then you can retire in a few years.” “The profits are nearly swallowed up in improvements and transit,” said Joyce. “It is a bare subsistence.”