n
hand. Now he was clad in his own clothes, not in scratch garments many
sizes too wide for him. As she had just been telling her mother, she
had seen at a glance that he was thoroughbred; now he looked more so
than ever.

"Oh yes, he can--sometimes," she said. "You know, I like the English of
a certain sort, though I detest those of another."

"Well, why do you bear down upon me singing an aggressive war-song--at
me? _At_ me, of course."

"Was I?"

"You know you were. You were rubbing in Bronker's Spruit, and Ingogo,
and Majuba, and all that."

"It's rather chilly after the rain," she said, looking around with a
shiver. "But it is going to be a lovely day."

Her irrelevant prediction was true enough. Not a cloud remained in the
sky, which was deepening more and more to its vivid daylight blue, as
the sun, just rising over a great ironstone krantz which crested the
range beyond the river, flooded the wide valley, dissipating the faint
mist engendered by the night's moisture, and causing the raindrops still
lingering on the Karroo bushes and scattered mimosa to scintillate like
the purest diamonds. Birds twittered among the willows by the dam, and
in the quince hedges, and away over the wide veldt, the cock koorhaans
answered each other in their shrill, barking crow, as though rejoicing
in the glowing splendour of the newly-born day.

"Yes, I think it is," he answered. "But, to come back to what we were
saying. I don't think that `Volkslied' is much of a song, you know.
For instance, `Van Kaffer, Brit, of Jingo-kliek' is a pretty good sample
of doggerel. Then, again, the whole thing is a little too pietistic for
ordinary use. The tune is a fine one, but the words--well, they are a
trifle poor."

"Are they? Oh yes--and what about `God Save the Queen'? Isn't that
just as pietistic? And `Confound their politics, frustrate their
knavish tricks'--how is that for doggerel, eh?" And, firing up with her
subject, Aletta's face became quite animated, and the colour rushed over
it in such wise as to render it very attractive--at least, so thought
the onlooker, and secretly rejoiced in the situation, enjoying it
hugely.

"H'm, well, perhaps. But, doesn't it strike you, Miss De la Rey, that
you are wasting your cartridges by blazing them into me? Why, I am more
than half of your way of thinking already. Ask your father if I am
not."

The girl's face changed entirely, taking on a wondrously pleased
ex