It was a dreary place, save for Hilda.

The bare daub-and-wattle walls; the clumps of misshapen and dusty prickly-pears that girt round the thatched huts of the Kaffir workpeople; the stone-penned sheep-kraals, and the corrugated iron roof of the bald stable for the waggon oxen--all was as crude and ugly as a new country can make things.

It seemed to me a desecration that Hilda should live in such an unfinished land--Hilda, whom I imagined as moving by nature through broad English parks, with Elizabethan cottages and immemorial oaks--Hilda, whose proper atmosphere seemed to be one of coffee-coloured laces, ivy-clad abbeys, lichen-incrusted walls--all that is beautiful and gracious in time-honoured civilisations.
Nevertheless, we lived on there in a meaningless sort of way--I hardly knew why.

To me it was a puzzle.

When I asked Hilda, she shook her head with her sibylline air and answered, confidently: "You do not understand Sebastian as well as I do.