Read "The Shadow of the Past" by Ethel Mills online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Sweeping swiftly, as quickly scudding clouds will sweep athwart a wind-swept sky, memories that were not wholly bitter flashed across Matheson's mind with each mile that he covered on his journey to Benfontein. Some odd thought or phrase or emotion leapt out of the past into prominence and held him with all the vital qualities of a thing newly realised. Always in imagination he was speeding towards Benfontein, though Nel's rondavel, and not the farm of Andreas Krige, was his ultimate destination.
From some unexplained, and indeed inexplicable, reason, he had shrunk from being seen off on this journey by his fiancee. She had proposed being at the station for that purpose; but he had raised so many difficulties that she had reluctantly given way to his obvious wish for solitude; and when the time for departure came there was no one on the platform to speed his going.