nriched with diamonds and pearls:

"I think you mentioned that you lived in the neighbourhood? May I know who
I have the a--pleasure of being indebted to for finding my daughter
to-day?"

"I am Mrs. Owen Saxham. I live at that grey stone house up there on the
cliff. 'Plas Bendigaid,' they call it," explains Lynette, a little
nervously, as her reluctant eyes scan the face and figure of the woman who
owns the legal right to bear Beauvayse's name. The encounter is
distasteful to her. She is painfully conscious of an acute sensation of
antagonism and dislike. "The house belongs to my husband, and this is my
first visit to Herion," she adds hurriedly, "because we--my husband and
I--have not been very long married. But I like the place. And the house is
charming, and there is a hall that was once the chapel, when it was a
Convent. It shall be a chapel again; that is"--the wild-rose colour
deepens on the lovely face--"if my husband agrees? To have it so restored
would make the Plas seem more like a home, because I was brought up in a
Convent, though not in England."

Her eyes stray back to the sun-kissed beauty of Nantmadoc Bay and the
dotted line of white spots that indicate the town of St. Tudwalls at the
base of the green promontory beyond the Roads. She forgets that this
little overdressed person is Beauvayse's wife. She forgets in the moment
that she herself is Saxham's. She is back in the beloved past with the
Mother.

"It was in South Africa, my Convent ... more than a thousand miles from
Cape Town, in British Baraland, on the Transvaal Border--in a little
village-town, dumped down in the middle of the veld."

"What on earth is the veld?" asks the lady of the red umbrella, with
acerbity. "I'm sick of seeing the word in the papers, and nobody seems to
know what it means."

Lynette's soft voice answers:

"You can never know what it means until you have lived its life, and it
has become part of yours. It spreads away farther than your eyes can
follow it, for miles and miles. It is jade colour in spring, blue-green in
early summer, desolate, scorching yellow-brown in winter, with dreadful
black tracts of cinders, where it has been burned to let the young grass
grow up. There is hardly a tree; there is scarcely a bird, except a
vulture, a black speck high in the hot blue sky. There are flat-topped
mountains and cone-shaped kopjes, reddish, or pale pink, or
mauve-coloured, as they are nearer or farther away. And that