human
Oh, Maurice, darling, it is you at last!
gpt
Me? Rather! And `at last' is about the word for it. And so my little girl has been waiting here for me ever since I went away. Confess! Hasn't she?
human
Yes.
gpt
Of course. This was always our favourite retreat, wasn't it? Still, I thought just the very moment I happened to arrive you would be anywhere else--with the rest of the crowd. It's just one's luck as a rule. But mine is better this time--rather!
human
But--but--where's Renshaw?
gpt
H'm--ha!--Renshaw? Well--he isn't here--hasn't come, anyhow.
human
But--is he coming on after you?
gpt
M--well. The fact is, Violet darling, you don't care about anything or anybody now we are together again? The long and the short of it is, poor Fanning has rather come to grief!
human
Come to grief!
gpt
Well--yes. Fact is, I'm afraid the poor chap will never show up here again. He got hit--bowled over by those cursed Bushmen or Korannas, or whatever they were. We had to give them leg-bail, I can tell you. They pinked him with one of their poisoned arrows. He's done for.
human
Oh! Poor Renshaw! cried Violet, in horror.
gpt
But you--you are unhurt, dearest? You have--have come back to me safe!
human
Safe as a church. I got a trifle damaged too. Sprained my ankle just at the wrong time--those Bushmen devils coming on hard in our rear. Touch and go, I'll tell you all about it by-and-bye. I shan't tell the others about Fanning all at once--break it gradually, you know. So don't you cut in with it.
gpt
Poor Renshaw! That was all. In those two words she dismissed the memory of the man but for whose unselfish heroism the lover in whose embrace she nestled so restfully, so gladsomely, would now be lying in ghastly fragments among the weird mountains of that far-away land.
human
Poor Renshaw! Such was his epitaph at her lips. Truly her all-absorbing clandestine passion had exercised no improving, no softening influence upon Violet Avory--as, indeed, how should it?--for was it not the intensely selfish absorption of an intensely selfish nature!
gpt
Poor Renshaw!