resses, were he in the mood. But she had
never quarrelled with him about the Kid before. Now when he bought some
coloured print and a Boer sunbonnet, and some shifts and stockings of a
traveller in drapery and hosiery, and ordered her thenceforwards to see
that the girl went properly clothed, a new terror, a fresh torture, was
added to the young life. The woman had ignored, neglected, sometimes
ill-used her, but she had never hated her until now.

And Bough, the big, burly, dark-skinned man with the strange light eyes,
and the bold, cruel, red mouth, and the bushy brown whiskers, why did he
follow her about with those strange eyes, and smile secretly to himself?
She was no longer fed on scraps; she must sit and eat at table with the
man and his mistress, and learn to use knife and fork.

She outgrew the dress Bough had bought her, and another, and another, and
this did not make Bough angry; he only smiled. A man having some secret
luxury or treasure locked away in a private cupboard will smile so. He
knows it is there, and he means to go to the hiding-place one day, but in
the meantime he waits, licking his lips.

The girl had always feared Bough, and shrunk from his anger with
unutterable terror. But the blow of his heavy hand was more bearable than
his smile and his jesting amiability. Now, when she went down to the
kraals on an errand, or to the orchard or garden for fruit or vegetables,
or to the river for water as of old, she heard his light, cautious,
padding footsteps coming after her, and would turn and pass him with
downcast eyes, and go back to the inn, and take a beating for not having
done her errand. Beating she comprehended, but this mysterious change in
the man Bough filled her with sick, secret loathing and dread. She did not
know why she bolted the door of the outhouse now when she crept to her
miserable bed.

Once Bough dropped into her lap a silver dollar, saying with a smile that
she was getting to be quite a little woman of late. She leaped to her feet
as though a scorpion had stung her, and stood white to the very lips, and
speechless, while the big silver coin rolled merrily away into a distant
corner, and lay there. The frowzy woman with the bleached hair happened to
come in at that moment; or had she been spying through a crack of the
door? Bough pretended he had accidentally dropped the coin, picked it up,
and went away.

That night he and the woman quarrelled fiercely. She could hear