s beyond all that. His gross body, headless, rent and
torn as though the devils it had housed had wreaked their fury on their
dwelling, lay sandwiched between the wreckage of the great chimney and the
millstone that had paved its hearth, now a yawning cavity, some six feet
deep. Leaning on its side in a trench its own weight had dug in the stony
earth of the dirty courtyard was the huge stone that had topped the shaft.
Something ugly was wedged in the central hole that had been made bigger to
let out the smoke. And the murderer's soul, light as a dried leaf
fluttering through the illimitable spaces of Eternity, went wandering on
its way to the Balances of God.

* * * * *

The party of Cape Police who had searched Haargrond Plaats, with the
drab-painted cart, the three Engineers, and the dandified little officer,
had only ridden to a safe distance. They halted, and, concealed from
observation by a fold of the grassy veld, waited for the explosion of the
dynamite cartridge. When it came, the Engineer officer shut his
binoculars, and gave the signal to return.

LIII

There were two funerals in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp, upon a night that
no one will forget who stood in the packed throng of shadowy mourners
about each of those open graves. The wind blew soft from the west, and the
vault of heaven might have been hollowed out of the darkling depths of an
amethyst of inconceivable splendour and planetary size. Myriads of stars,
dazzlingly white, swung under this, the Mother's fitting canopy, shared
with another, not like her holy, not noble or unselfish or devoted, but
like her in that he was brave and much beloved.

Beloved undoubtedly. You could not look at the crowding faces about the
narrow open trench where the Reverend Julius Fraithorn read the Burial
Service by lantern-light without being sure of that. Men's eyes were wet,
and women sobbed unrestrainedly. He had been so beautiful and so merry
and cheerful always, said the wet-eyed women; the men praised him for
having been such a swordsman, horseman, shot. Everyone spoke of him as the
life and soul of the garrison, the idol of his brother-officers, and
worshipped by the men under his command. Everyone had something to tell of
dead Beauvayse that was pleasant to hear.

But the great bulk of the crowd was massed behind the black-robed,
white-coiffed figures of the Sisters, kneeling rigid and immovable about
the second open