lashes
flickered, then she took up her story. "Perhaps we were a hundred and
fifty miles from Gueldersdorp, perhaps more, when we came upon what we
believed at first to be the dead body of a young girl, almost a child,
lying among the karroo bush, face downwards, upon the sand. She had been
cruelly beaten with the sjambok--she bears the scars of that terrible
ill-usage to-day.... We judged that she had fainted and fallen from one of
the emigrants' trek-waggons. Months afterwards, when her wounds were
healed"--her steady lips quivered slightly--"and she had recovered from an
attack of brain-fever brought on by alarm and anxiety and the ill-usage,
she told me that she had run away from people who were cruel to her--from
a man who----"

"This distresses you. I am grieved----"

He noted the sickness of horror in her face, and the starting of
innumerable little shining points of moisture on her white, broad forehead
and about her lips. She drew out her handkerchief and wiped them away with
a hand that shook a little.

"I have very little more to say. She was quite crushed and broken by
cruelty and ill-usage. No native child could have been more ignorant--she
could not even tell us her name when we asked it. She probably had never
had one. And Father Wix, who is our Convent Chaplain, and has charge of
the Catholic Mission here, baptised her at my instance, giving her two
names that were dear to me in that old life that I left behind so long
ago. She is Lynette Mildare.... Are you surprised that in seven years a
young creature so neglected should have become what you see? Those powers
were inherent in her which training can but develop. We found in her great
natural capacity, an intelligence keen and quick, a taste naturally
refined, a sweet and gentle disposition, a pure and loving heart----" Her
voice broke. Her eyes were blinded by a sudden rush of tears. She moved
her hand as though to say: "There is no more to tell."

"You shut the door upon my hope," he said.

It was to her veritably as though the gates of her own deed clashed
behind her with the closing of the sentence. For she had stated the
absolute truth, and yet left much untold. She saw disappointment and
reluctant conviction in his face, coupled with an immense faith in her
that stung her to an agony of shame and self-reproach. What had she
suppressed?

Nothing, but that the waggons of the emigrants had turned south for
Diamond Town a fortnight before the