me.

"'It is evident you cannot have both a husband and a
father,' he said; 'but I am sorry for the rudeness,
kleintje. He is a greater man than I.'

"'I think you might have made it otherwise,' I answered,
for my heart ached for my father.

"He shrugged his shoulders. 'You must manage to forgive
me,' he said. 'I have a thousand dozen bricks to make, and
that will be punishment enough.'

"'But you will not start again tonight!' I cried, for it
was already the thin end of evening, and he was taking off
his clean clothes.

"'A thousand dozen is a big handful,' he answered, smiling.
'There's nothing like getting a grip on the work ahead.'

"So in a few minutes he was down in the water again, and
the mud flew as he worked at the heart-breaking task he had
taken upon him. After all, the ragout was expensive to
make. It came dearer than we expected.

"Late into the night he held on, though thrice I went out
to the bank of the stream to beg him to quit it and come to
bed. There was a great pale moon that night, which threw up
the colors of things strongly, and I have yet in my mind--
and my heart--that picture,--the stained water, and the bank
of gray mud over it, and between the two my Kornel bent
over the endless boxes, vehemently working with no
consideration for the limits of his strength. His arms
gleamed with the wet, and were ceaseless; he might have
been a dumb machine, without capacity for weariness. If he
had toiled before, now he toiled doubly; there was a
trouble in his mind to be sweated out and a debt of money
to be repaid. And also, like a peril always near at hand,
there was the thin margin that stood between us and
starvation.

"When he came to bed at length, he lay down without the
greeting he was wont to give me--lapsed into his place
beside me with the limpness of a man spent to the utmost
ounce. He slept without turning on his side, his worn
hands, half-closed, lying loosely on the quilt. Yet within
an hour after daylight he rose with narrow, sleep-burdened
eyes, fumbled into his clothes, and staggered out to the
spruit again, to resume his merciless work with the very
fever of energy. The Kafirs that worked leisurely on the
next plot stopped to look at him and to wonder at the speed
with which the rows of drying bricks lengthened and
multiplied. I saw them pointing as I stood at the door,
heavy-hearted and anxious, and envied the ease of their
manner of life, and the simplicity that coul