John freed himself from his aunt's detaining hold in order to vindicate his insulted manhood; and Esme left them to their scuffling and went upstairs to unpack. When she came down again her brother-in-law had come home. He sat by the window smoking his pipe, but he rose when she entered and came forward and kissed her. He was a heavily-built, good-looking man, with a boisterous geniality of manner which worried his sister-in-law. Oddly, he never realised her objection. He liked her and laboured under the delusion that she reciprocated his affection. He kissed her heartily. "Glad to see you back, old girl," he said, and reseated himself in the only comfortable chair in the room and resumed his pipe. "You look very fit. I told Rose the Zuurberg would set you up; but she won't hear a good word for it. There isn't much to do up there, certainly, but loaf around. The drive up, though, is all right. Pretty--isn't it?" She laughed, to his puzzled surprise. She often surprised him by the way in which she received his remarks. He had said nothing to cause her merriment. But he preferred smiling faces to glum looks, and so he did not resent it when she laughed at nothing. "I suppose loafing around was what I needed," she said, steering clear of a discussion on the scenery. "Living in the open air with nothing to do is a fine tonic." "Yes," he agreed. "I'd like a little of that myself. A man who spends all his days in an office ought to get away now and again; but when it comes to carting a wife and kids around with one it makes an expensive business of it. Rose ought to see that a man needs change from his work." "We are most of us short-sighted where the needs of other people are concerned," she returned with an ambiguity which he did not suspect. "I suppose it would be rather nice if I remembered that Rose hasn't had a holiday and went out to help her with the preparations for your evening meal." "Rot!" he ejaculated, unperceiving the drift of her reflections. "You finish out your holiday and sit down and talk to me." But she elected to go in quest of her sister, who was busy in the kitchen, aided by an incompetent Kaffir girl of an amiable disposition, which revealed itself in the broad smile she gave the young missis when she appeared in the bright, hot little kitchen, which looked out, as her bed room looked out, on the white yard shaded by the big oleander tree beneath which the children played happily in their cramped but secure playground. It was a homelike, pleasant enough picture; but the girl's thoughts strayed persistently to the green open spaces, and the pleasant ease of the life she had left behind her. She felt a new dissatisfaction with her present surroundings. "Can I help?" she asked. Her sister turned round from the stove with flushed preoccupied face to stare at her. "In that dress! Goodness! no. Besides, it's all ready--or ought to be. But Maggie won't keep a good fire."