ought for the first time that if the woman who had
been her mother, and who slept out there in the dark under the
boulder-cairn, had lived, she might have touched her child so. Then she
closed the window quickly, for she heard, afar off, the gallop of a
hard-ridden horse drawing nearer--nearer. And she knew that Bough was
coming back.

He came.

She heard him dismount before the door, give the horse to the sleepy
Barala ostler, and let himself into the bar. She heard him clink among the
glasses and bottles. She heard his foot upon the three-step stair, and on
the landing. It did not pass by. It stopped at the locked door of the room
where she was.

Then his voice bade her rise and open the door. She could not speak or
move.

She was dumb and paralysed with deadly terror. She heard his coaxing voice
turn angry; she listened in helpless terrified silence to his oaths and
threats; then she heard him laugh softly, and the laugh was followed by
the jingle of a bunch of skeleton keys. He always carried them; they saved
trouble, he used to say.

They saved him trouble now. When the bent wire rattled in the lock, and
the key fell out upon the floor, she screamed, and his coarse chuckle
answered. She was cowering against the wall in a corner of the room when
he came in and picked up the key and locked the door. But when his
stretched-out, grasping hand came down upon her slight shoulder, she
turned and bit it like some savage, desperate little animal, drawing the
blood. Bough swore at the sudden sting of the sharp white teeth. So the
little beast showed fight, eh? Well, he would teach her that the master
will have his way.

There was no one else in the house, and if there had been it would have
served her not at all. God sat in timeless Eternity beyond these mists of
earth, and saw, and made no sign. It was not until the man Bough slept the
heavy sleep of liquor and satiety that the thought of flight was born in
her with desperate courage to escape him. The shutters had been left
unbolted, and the window was yet a little way open. She sprang up and
threw it wide, leaped out upon the stoep, and from thence to the ground,
and fled blindly, breathlessly over the veld into the night.

VII

Bough, as soon as it was dawn, sent three of the Kaffirs from the kraals,
in different directions, to search for her, and, mounted on a fresh pony,
took the fourth line of search himself.

He had chosen the right direction for