, was of the
de Villiers stock from over the borders of the Free State,
a commandant's daughter, and the youngest of fourteen
children. They were both people of a type common enough.
Andreas was to all seeming just such a Burgher as a hundred
others who have grown rich quietly, never heard of outside
their own districts, yet as worthy as others whom every one
nods to at Nachtmaal. Anna, too, was of an everyday
pattern, a short plump woman, with a rosy solemn face and
pleasant eyes--a sound Boer woman, who could carry out her
saddle, catch her horse and mount him without help. You
see, in her big family, the elders were all men, and most
had seen service against the Kafirs, and a girl there won
esteem not by fallals and little tripping graces, but by
usefulness and courage and good fellowship. She saw Andreas
first when he was visiting his mother's aunt in her
neighborhood. There was shooting at a target, for a prize
of an English saddle, and no one has ever said of him that
he was not a wonderful shot. He carried off the prize
easily, against all the Boers of those parts, and Anna's
father and brothers among them. A few months later they
were married.

"They drove from Anna's home to Andreas' farm on the
bushveld in a Cape cart with two horses, and sat close
under the hood while the veld about them was lashed with
the first rains of December. It was no time for a journey
by road, but in those days the country was not checkered
with railway lines as it is now, and Anna had nothing to
say against a trifle of hardship. For miles about them the
rolling country of the Free State was veiled with a haze of
rain, and the wind drove it in sheets here and there, till
the horses staggered against it, and the drum of the storm
on the hood of the cart was awesome and mournful. Towards
afternoon, after a long, slow trek, they came down the
slope towards Buys' Drift, and Andreas pulled his horses up
at the edge of the water.

"The rains had swelled the river to a flood, and it ran
with barely a ripple where ordinarily the bushes were clear
of the water. Full a hundred and fifty yards it spanned,
and as they looked, they saw it carry past a dead ox and
the rags of uprooted huts.

"'We can never cross till it goes down,' said Andreas. 'I
am sorry for it, but there is no choice. We must go back to
your father's house.'

"Anna pressed his arm and smiled.

"'You are joking,' she said. 'You know well that I will not
go back th