xes where they were
stowed away. Then we disestablished the old Hottentot cook--`cook'
indeed!--and behold the result!"

"It's great--great!" cried Dick Selmes with enthusiasm. Then, becoming
guiltily aware that he might be seeming to disparage his host's normal
arrangements, he added lamely, "Er--of course, we do get--er--as you
say, Miss Brandon, with nobody to take care of us. And--you've done it,
and no mistake."

Then old Hesketh put a few of his terse, laconic questions as to the
welfare of those she had left at home, and characteristically dismissed
the subject from his mind. Harley Greenoak, normally taciturn, said
little; but Dick Selmes was a host in himself, and soon the conversation
became a dialogue between these two young people. They were chattering
away as if they had known each other all their lives.

Soon after breakfast the Cape cart was inspanned.

"I'm hopin', sir," said Elsie McGunn, just before she climbed to her
seat, "that ye'll nae be takkin' it ill onything A may have said."

"Not a bit of it, Elsie," cried Dick, shaking her heartily by the hand.
"Not a bit of it. Why, you've given us a thundering big laugh or two.
What better could one say? Good-bye."

"Ay, but yander's a braw laddie," whispered the Scotswoman to her
charge, as they bade each other good-bye. "A braw laddie, and a guid
one. Mind your hairt, lassie; mind your hairt." And flicking her whip,
she sent the cart jolting off down the winding stony road.

CHAPTER SIX.

HARLEY GREENOAK HAS MISGIVINGS.

The coming of Hazel Brandon effected something like a revolution at
Haakdoornfontein, for she was as good as her word, and at once set to
work to reform the interior of that easy-going, happy-go-lucky
establishment out of all recognition. The table department she kept
going on the same lines as the initiation we saw her make, and the same
extended to the rooms. No more dust, no more makeshifts. From all
sorts of unsuspected places she fished out hidden things. Dick Selmes,
for instance, coming in after a long day's hunt, stared to find what
magic had been wrought in his room. Snowy sheets and pillow-cases on
the bed, things his host despised as feminine superfluities, equally
snowy towels instead of the one cloudy one he had been forced to make
shift with; the rickety three-legged washstand with its rusty tin basin
had given way to a neat chintz-covered packing-case and patterned
crockery--and the empty-bott