Legion of Frontiersmen. Everybody remembered the Boer war and the contingents that had sprung up in a night. It was this stirring all about them that caught Valerie’s spirit of adventure, that excited her, and that made the return to Dargaville seem a very flat affair.
Most of the way home she was wondering what she could do if the war went on. No one had begun to think yet of the part women would play, but they had gone to the Boer war in all kinds of capacity. And both she and Dane were free, and had the money to go. She did not doubt then that she would be able to persuade him to go, or that it would take any persuading.
When the steamer reached Dargaville Roger Benton, George Rhodes, Bob, Allison and Bolton and several other men were gathered together on the wharf. It did not strike Valerie at first that, eager for news, they had come to meet her and Dane. It ended by their all going to Mac’s to dinner. Mysteriously the hotel filled up with men, and seeing what they wanted Dane turned himself into an informal lecturer, and stood half-way up the stairs talking all he knew of the last week’s doings to a tense group gathered about in the hall and round the bar door.
It was after ten o’clock when they went out to the Diana, which Dane had left in one of Mac’s boathouses. Valerie had a funny feeling as she got into it that she was being cut off from the world, as if she had been dropped down a deep well. It was bad enough to live in a place like New Zealand at such a time, isolated from the biggest thing in history, a thing that was actually going on in your own day and not in dreams, but it was worse to be going away from such avenues of information as there were. She wondered how Dane could do it. And just for a minute she felt a hostility to him of which she was ashamed.
