maid, as she wishes for her own reasons to remain
behind. Please have the mare and spider here by mid-day coffee-time. We
can drive north towards Haargrond and double back when we're beyond the
lines, as the coursed hare would do."

Van Busch's red mouth gleamed, curved back from his tobacco-stained teeth.
He said with meaning:

"Boers shoot hares--not run them."

"They may shoot or not shoot," proclaimed Lady Hannah. "I start
to-morrow."

"Without boots or shoes?" asked the red-edged, yellow-fanged smile.

"Barefoot if I must," she answered, with all the more spirit that she felt
like the hare struggling in a wire. "Please send for the mare and the
trap. I leave this place to-morrow."

"The mare and the spider have been commandeered for the use of the United
Republics," said Van Busch. As the angry colour flamed up in Lady Hannah's
small, pale cheeks, he added, shrugging his shoulders and spreading his
hands: "Bough did his best to save them for you, no bounce! But could one
man do anything against so many? Sure no, nothing at all!"

She lost patience, and stamped her little foot in its quilted satin
slipper.

"Do you suppose I haven't guessed by this time that Bough the Africander
and Van Busch the British-Johannesburger are one Boer when it suits them
both?"

His hand, copper-brown as his face, and with the marks of old tattooing
obliterated by an acid burn, jerked as he raised it to stroke and feel his
whiskers. Something else upon the hand, in the sharpened state of all her
senses, struck out a spark of old association, and recalled a name once
known. She went on.

"How many men are you, Mr. Van Busch or Bough? You provoke the question
when I see you wearing the Mildare crest and coat-of-arms."

He had turned the deeply-engraved sard with his brown thumb and clenched
his fist upon it, but as swiftly changed his mind, and took off the ring
and handed it to her.

"I had this ring off Bough, that's a real live man, and a thundering good
pal of mine, for all your funning. The chap it belonged to died at a farm
Bough owned once. Somewhere in Natal it might have been. And the bloke who
died there was a big bug in England, Bough always thought. But he came
tramping, and hauled up with hardly duds to his back or leather to his
feet. Sick, too, and coughing like a sheep with the rinderpest. Bough was
kind to him, but he got worse and worse. One night Bough was sitting up
with him reading the Bible, when he ma