Home is Goodbye by Isobel Chace

and even their inevitable goats, and sheep that looked just like goats, ran madly round in small circles wondering what it was all about. Sara saw her patient of the morning running with the best of them and marvelled at his stoic acceptance of pain, which is one of the African’s greatest qualities.
    The Piper Tripacer came down just outside the village and a tall, lanky young man climbed out of the cockpit.
    ‘Been wanting to see you anyway, Matt!’ he shouted out. ‘ ’Bout some sisal of mine. Wondered if you could put it through your drying plant some time?’
    It was a typical greeting in a country where men changed their manners with their clothes. No one could be more formal than either of these two men when the time was right.
    ‘Did James send off the stuff yesterday, do you know?’ Matt asked in return. ‘If it didn’t go, it missed the ship Mackenzie’s bought space on.’
    John Halliday shrugged his shoulders.
    ‘Ain’t seen anyone from Kwaheri recently,’ he said.
    Sara came towards them, her lips curling with amusement. She liked the look of the Tripacer’s owner. He was the friendliest-looking person she had seen for a very long time.
    ‘Ain’t you going to introduce me?’ Halliday asked.
    Matt did so with an obvious reluctance that caused both of them to raise their eyebrows.
    ‘I thought you’d be falling over yourselves to welcome me,’ John complained, his eyes dancing from one face to the other.
    ‘Oh, we are!’ Sara assured him almost too hastily. Matt frowned slightly and she subsided into silence. For a base moment she wondered whether Matt didn’t like their rescuer because of his rather odd accent, but this unworthy thought wa s banished in the next instant when he said: ‘My dear John, it isn’t that you’re not welcome but that you’re so long overdue!’
    ‘Overdue be damned! How was I to know that you’d trek miles? It’s taken me hours to find you!’ His blue eyes flashed in the sunlight. ‘Of course I might have taken even longer if I’d known what charming company you had!’ Sara blushed and Matt laughed.
    ‘You have to be careful what you say to Nurse Wayne,’ he warned John in a soft drawl. ‘She takes things very seriously.’
    ‘Like what?’ Sara asked indignantly, resenting what looked like an aspersion on her sense of humour.
    ‘Like Marjorie dramatizing herself as a lost soul in the middle of Africa yearning for her birthright at home!’ Sara looked at him angrily. What right had he to sneer at a woman who had been homesick while she had been in pain? Everyone couldn’t be as impervious to their surroundings as he was.
    ‘It was perfectly natural that she should think of her homeland at such a time,’ she said rather primly. Matt shrugged his shoulders. He had wanted to make her rise and she had. He wondered why he had got so little satisfaction out of it.
    ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘I told you you took things too seriously and you’ve proved my point for me.’
    Where now were those few precious moments beside the fire when they had been picnicking together in complete harmony? Sara felt hurt to the quick, but she was too proud to show it. Perhaps she had been a little lacking in humour, but she hadn’t thought that Matt would be unkind. She glanced from one man to the other and saw that John too was puzzled by Matt’s remarks.
    ‘A stretch in the open doesn’t seem to have done you much good ! ’ he said dryly. ‘I think we’d better do something about flying you out before you develop a real grudge.’
    Matt gave him a reluctant smile. ‘I’ve never known you not take a pretty girl’s part,’ he said, ‘Or I might be more impressed.’
    He swung away from them and began to walk back to the village, leaving them to follow when they would.
    ‘You been doing something that you shouldn’t?’ John asked.
    Sara looked after Matt’s retreating back with tears pricking at the back of her eyes.
    ‘I don’t know,’ she