d never getting thanked for it. I started to push my way
up here, two hundred miles from Diamond Town, three weeks back, with a
letter from a woman to her husband. She couldn't pay me nothing, poor old
girl. Said she'd pray for me to her dying day. There was a pal of mine put
up the grubstake. His name"--his evil eyes were glued upon her face--"was
Bough. You've heard that name before!"

It was an assertion, not a question. The fierce rush of crimson to her
brow, and the flame that leaped into her eyes, had already spoken to her
knowledge. She was deadly quiet, gathering all her superb forces for a
sudden lioness-spring. He went on:

"He's a widower now, Bough, and well-to-do. Getting on for rich. Got
religion too, highly respected. Says Bough to me, 'There's a young woman
at the Convent at Gueldersdorp that's not the sort for holy, praying
ladies to have under their roof, for all the glib slack-jaw she may have
given them.'"

Her great eyes burned on him.

"Say what you have to say, and be brief. Go on."

He shifted from one foot to the other, and licked his fleshy lips.

"I've got to tell the story my own way, lady. Don't you quarrel with it.
Says Bough: 'They picked her up on the veld seven years ago, a runaway in
rags. As pretty a girl she was,' says he, 'as you'd see in a month's trek,
and from what I hear they've made a lady of her.'"

Still silent and watchful, and her eyes upon him, searching him. He went
on:

"'However the years have changed her,' says Bough, 'you'll spot her by her
little feet and hands, and her slender shape, and her big eyes, like
yellow diamonds, and her hair, the colour of dried tobacco-leaf in the
sun....'"

She quivered in every limb, and longed to shut her eyes and bar out the
intolerable sight of him, leering and lying there. Had she not
interrupted, she must have cried out. She said:

"You tell me this man Bough is at Diamond Town?"

"I said he was there when I left. The young woman he talked of was brought
up at his place in Orange Free State, a nice respectable boarding-house
and hotel for travelling families on the veld between Driepoort and
Kroonfontein. Bough was good to the girl, and so was his wife, that's dead
since. Uncommon! Not that they had much of the dibs to spend in those
days. But, being an honest Christian man, Bough treated the girl like his
own. And right down bad she served him."

He licked his thick lips again, and the flattish, light-hued adder-eyes