tures scuttled across their wide
tracks. The patient oxen toiled under the yoke, their dappled nostrils
widespread, their great dewy eyes strained and dim with weariness. They
dumbly wondered why they must labour in the daytime when all night long
they had travelled without rest. The glorious sunrise had flamed in
crimson and gold behind the eastern ranges full five hours before. They
were weary to death, and no dorp or farm was yet in sight. The Cape boys
who tramped, each leading a fore-ox by the green reim bound about the
creature's wide horns, had no energy left even to swear at their beasts.

The Boer driver was wearied like the ox-team and the Cape boys. His
bestial face was drawn, and his eyes were red-rimmed for lack of sleep.
The long whip, with the fourteen-foot stock and the lash of twenty-three
feet, had not smacked for a long time; the sjambok had not been used upon
the long-suffering wheelers. Huddled up in his ill-fitting clothes of tan
cord, he sat on the waggon-box and slept, his head nodding, his elbows on
his knees. He was dreaming of the bad Cape brandy that had been in the
bottle, and would be, with luck, again, when the waggon reached a tavern
or a store.

A Kaffir drove the second waggon. It held stores and goods in bales, and
some trunks and other baggage belonging to the Englishman, for you would
have set down the tall, thin, high-featured, reddish-bearded,
soft-speaking man who owned the waggons as English, even though he had
called himself by a Dutch name. The child of three years was his. And his
had been the dead body of the woman lying on the waggon-bed, covered with
a new white sheet, with a stillborn boy baby lying on her breast.

For this the man who had loved and taken her, and made her his, had wept
such bitter, scalding tears. For this his dead love, with Love's blighted
bud of fruit upon her bosom, had given up her world, her friends, her
family--her husband, first and last of all. They had played the straight
game, and gone away openly together, to the immense scandal of Society
that is so willing to wink at things done cleverly under the rose. They
were to be married the instant the injured husband obtained his decree
absolute. The State sanctioned the re-marriage of the divorced if the
Churches did not. Their church should thenceforwards be the State. But
there was no _decree nisi_ even, the injured husband possessing a legal
heir by a previously-deceased wife. Besides, in a cold