rom him now, but would answer his questions
submissively, and give him her hand mechanically at meeting and parting.
Saxham had not the magnetic influence over shy and backward children that
another man possessed. She would smile and brighten when she saw the
Colonel coming, upright and alert as ever, though bearing heavy traces now
in the haggard lines and deep hollows of his face, to the greying hairs
above his temples and to the close-clipped brown moustache, as in the
Quixote-like gauntness of the figure that had never carried much flesh, of
the long struggle of close on seven months' duration.

The pleasant little whistle would die upon his lips when he saw her
sitting by the Mother's grave, plaiting grasses while the Sister sewed, or
making clumsy babyish attempts at drawing on her little slate. From this
she disliked to be parted, so her gentle nurses fastened it to one end of
a long ribbon, and its pencil to the other, and tied the ribbon about her
waist.

One day, as the Colonel stooped to speak to her, his keen glance noted
that the wavering outline of a house stood upon the little slate. The
living descendant of the primitive savage who had outlined the forms of
men and beasts upon the flank of the great boulder when this old world was
young, would have scorned the drawing, and with good reason. It was so
feeble and wavering an attempt to convey, in outline, the idea of a white
man's dwelling.

The roof sagged wonderfully, and the chimneys were at frenzied angles with
the sides of the irregular cube, with its four windows of impossibly
varying size, and the oblong patch that meant a door between them. Above
the door was another oblong, set transversely, and rather suggesting a
tavern-sign.

There were some clumsily indicated buildings, possibly sheds and stables
of daub and wattle, eking out the ramshackle house. Behind it and to the
left of it were scrawls that might have been meant for trees. An enclosure
of spiky lines might have indicated an orchard-hedge. And there were
things in the middle distance, also to the left, that you might accept as
beehives or as native kraals. The man who looked at them knew they were
native kraals. He drew in his breath sharply, and the fold between his
eyebrows deepened, as he scanned the clumsy drawing on the slate. Without
those rude lines in the foreground to the right of the house, enclosing a
little kopje of boulders and a low, irregular grave-mound, the drawing
wo