u dog? Own up, now. Who is she?"

"And that's your reason for wanting to make a pile, is it, Sellon?" said
Renshaw, tranquilly.

"I didn't say so," laughed the other. "Perhaps our object is the same,
for all that."

"Perhaps it is," was the good-humoured reply; "as you are bent on
thinking so."

CHAPTER EIGHT.

QUITS.

The days went by, and Renshaw steadily gained in health and strength.
He was now able to walk about at will, to take short rides in the early
morning, and towards sundown, carefully avoiding the heat of the day,
and to begin looking after his stock again. Not that the state of the
latter afforded him much encouragement, poor fellow, for each day
witnessed an alarming decrease in the few hundred starving animals the
drought had left him. Meanwhile, the burning, brassy heavens were
without a cloud, save an occasional one springing suddenly from the
horizon, as though to mock at the terrible anxiety of the dwellers in
this desert waste, and as suddenly melting away, together with many an
eager, unspoken hope for the longed-for rain. Not a breath of air, save
now and again one of those strange whirlwinds which, heaving up bits of
dried stick and dust from the baked and gasping earth, and spinning them
round in its gyrating course, moves in a waterspoutlike column along the
plain, to vanish into empty air as suddenly as it arose--sure sign of
drought, or the continuance of the same, say the stock-growers, out of
the plenitude of their experience. The veldt was studded with the
shrivelled, rotting carcases of dead animals, scattered about here and
there in little clumps of tens and twenties, to the advantage of clouds
of great white vultures wheeling aloft ere settling down upon the
plentiful repast. Even the very lizards peering forth from the cracks
and crannies of the walls, or basking on the clay summit of old Kaatje's
outdoor oven, seemed gasping for air, for moisture.

All this Renshaw contemplated with the recklessness of a player who has
staked his last napoleon. Every day increased the unrest that was upon
him, the feverish longing to get away. It was not the mere run-down
feeling of one who desires a change, or the eagerness of a sensitive
mind to see the last of a detested locality. There was more than this
underlying it, and Maurice Sellon, watching him narrowly, though
unobtrusively, noted the circumstance, shrewdly guessing, moreover, that
anxiety on behalf of the mysteriou