f the sort of good-humoured, faintly contemptuous indulgence with which
he had listened to the singing of her praises by one or other of its
members, what time her personality represented to him simply the
original of those unprepossessing portraits which adorned the
sitting-room; and he acknowledged that the laugh now was completely
turned against himself.

Then his thoughts took a new vein, and he seemed to hear the comments of
those among whom he had sometime moved--"Colvin Kershaw? Oh yes.
Married some farm girl out in Africa and turned Boer, didn't he?" and
more to the same effect, uttered in a languid, semi-pitying tone by this
or that unit of a society whose shibboleth was the mystical word
"smart," a society he had been in but not of. Well, so be it. Let them
drawl out their banal inanities. In this case he hoped they would do so
with reason.

Hoped? For he was not sure, far from it; and herein lay one of the
"symptoms," Not that he would have loved Aletta one iota the less had he
been sure. He was not one of those to whom the joy of possession is
measured by the excitement and uncertainty of pursuit; and there are
some of whom this holds good, however difficult it may be to persuade,
at any rate the ornamental sex, that such can possibly be the case. On
the contrary, he would feel grateful to one who should spare him the
throes and doubts calculated to upset even an ordinarily well-balanced
mind under the circumstances, and proportionately appreciative. But
whatever of diffidence or anxiety might take hold upon his own mind,
Colvin Kershaw was not the man to display it in the presence of its
first cause. The cringing, adoring, beseeching suitor of not so very
old-fashioned fiction struck him as somewhat contemptible, and as of
necessity so appearing to the object of his addresses, no matter how
much she might really care for him at heart. He must run his chance to
win or lose, and if he lost, take it standing. There was none of the
_ad misericordiam_, wildly pleading element about him.

"_Pas op, Baas_! The bird!"

The words, emanating from his henchman, Gert Bondelzwart, brought him
down to earth again; for the occupation in which he had been engaged
during the above reverie was the prosaic one of attending to his daily
business, which in this case consisted in going round the ostrich camps
and inspecting such nests as he knew of, or discovering indications of
prospective ones. To a certain ex