to it, "I love her, I love her!" And just for the moment he was with her
on the way to Umtali. It was night. She sat in a corner asleep. Her soft
chin was tucked into her soft collar, her gold-brown lashes lay on her
cheeks. He doted on her delicate little nose, her perfect lips, her ear
like a baby's, and the gold-brown curl that half covered it. They were
passing through the jungle. It was warm and dark and far away. Then she
woke up and said, "Have I been asleep?" and he answered, "Yes. Are you all
right? Here, let me--" And he leaned forward to...He bent over her. This
was such bliss that he could dream no further. But it gave him the courage
to bound downstairs, to snatch his straw hat from the hall, and to say as
he closed the front door, "Well, I can only try my luck, that's all."

But his luck gave him a nasty jar, to say the least, almost immediately.
Promenading up and down the garden path with Chinny and Biddy, the ancient
Pekes, was the mater. Of course Reginald was fond of the mater and all
that. She--she meant well, she had no end of grit, and so on. But there
was no denying it, she was rather a grim parent. And there had been
moments, many of them, in Reggie's life, before Uncle Alick died and left
him the fruit farm, when he was convinced that to be a widow's only son was
about the worst punishment a chap could have. And what made it rougher
than ever was that she was positively all that he had. She wasn't only a
combined parent, as it were, but she had quarrelled with all her own and
the governor's relations before Reggie had won his first trouser pockets.
So that whenever Reggie was homesick out there, sitting on his dark veranda
by starlight, while the gramophone cried, "Dear, what is Life but Love?"
his only vision was of the mater, tall and stout, rustling down the garden
path, with Chinny and Biddy at her heels...

The mater, with her scissors outspread to snap the head of a dead something
or other, stopped at the sight of Reggie.