Free A Pride of Lions by Isobel Chace Page A

with you,” I suggested diffidently. “It doesn’t seem very serious to me.”
    He gave me a long, hard look. “No,” he agreed slowly. “Not serious for you perhaps, but for her, with no aim in life for her energies, it is a bad thing!”
    I raised my eyebrows. It seemed to me that Janice knew exactly where she was going. “Why don’t you tell her that? I’ll help you, if you like?”
    He shook his head with a deep sigh of regret. “It would be no good,” he admitted. “But to see a fine woman, so fragile, so beautiful, and not to want her to be perfect, is very hard! Why is she here? Why is she not in a good home, the wife of a good man?”
    “I think she likes what she’s doing,” I observed dryly. There was really very little difference between Katundi’s and Hans Doffnang’s view of the proper place of women, I thought.
    Mr. Doffnang squeezed my arm and smiled deep into my eyes. “I think she will like to be a married woman better!” he insisted confidently. His smugness was almost unbearable!
    “Why don’t you ask her?” I suggested crossly.
    He fingered his smooth, round face thoughtfully. “When I am ready I will tell her what I think,” he announced, well pleased with his own private thoughts. “And she will listen then,” he said.
    I had my own doubts about that, but something warned me that this was not the moment to voice them. Thank goodness, I thought, that the next day was Sunday. Sunday had a calm, confident quality that was not to be found on other days of the week. And besides, I was going to see Hugo Canning. It was a little unnerving to discover how much that meant to me, but then, with the rain still sluicing down, nothing was unmixed joy.
    It wasn’t to be expected!
    CHAPTER FIVE
    SUNDAY was different. The sun shone bright and clear over a land that was suddenly green and fruitful. The trees had come into flower and the birds were in a fever of activity, taking advantage of the thousands of insects that had apparently come to life during the night. It is impossible to describe the change that had taken place in just a few hours. What had been dry sticks a couple of days before were now leafy, flowering bushes and trees, each one incredibly beautiful. The gnidia trees and bushes had broken out into bright yellow flowers that would later fade to brown; fire bushes, originally from Colombia, were living up to their name; Australian flame trees were covered with masses of small scarlet blooms, which the indigenous Nandi flame trees did their best to compete with, merging into the lovely rosy red of the red flowering gum trees. Even the baobab trees had produced their white, hanging flowers that would lead to its equally odd oblong, woody fruits filled with pulp which, together with its leaves, are edible.
    Impossible to describe too was the variety of greens that had replaced the sunbaked straw of the dry weather, or the carpets of wild flowers that splurged over the ground everywhere one looked. It is an odd quirk of nature that where her opportunities are few, she runs riot when she can, leaving memories of colour and abundance to last through the long, long time of drought.
    We were all up early that Sunday. The brightness of the day brought us out of our beds, hungry and expectant, long before
    our normal hour. When I came back from the shower I found Janice concentrating on a series of bird photographs that she was taking in her spare time, hoping to publish them in a book later on. She had just finished a whole lot of colour photographs of the southern carmine bee-eater that occasionally passed through the camp in a flash of bright pink. Now she was trying to capture the local members of the starling family. Most of the ones that fought for the crumbs from our table were the redbreasted superb starlings, though one or two of the even more spectacular splendid glossy starlings came and went at intervals. Much more magnificent than the starlings of Europe, these were colourful