health in her cheeks, the thick
lashes half veiling the velvety-blue eyes!

"Well?" she said softly, looking up. "Talk to me."

"Haven't got anything to say. I'm tired. I prefer to look at you
instead."

"You are a dear to say so," she answered. "But all the same I want
livening up. I am getting a dreadful fossil--we all are--stuck away
here, and never seeing a soul. I believe I shall get mother to let me
go away for quite a long time. I am horribly tired of it all."

"And of me?"

"You know I am not."

The blue eyes were very soft as they met his. A wave of feeling swept
over the man. Looking at her in her winning, inviting beauty as she sat
there, an overwhelming impulse came upon him to claim her--to take her
for his own. Why should he not? He knew that it lay entirely with him.
He made a movement to rise. In another moment she would be in his
arms, and he would be pouring words of passion and tenderness into her
ear. The door opened.

"Haven't those two come in yet?" said Mrs Wenlock briskly, as she
re-entered, and quietly resumed her seat, thus unconsciously affecting a
momentous crisis in two lives. Was it for good or for ill? We shall
see.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Note 1. "You d--d Englishman! Be quiet. I'll knock your head off just
now."

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Note 2.

"Oom Paul is riding on a pig--
He falls off and hurts himself,
Then climbs up and rides away--"

A nonsensical bit of popular doggerel. In Dutch it makes a jingling
rhyme.

CHAPTER SIX.

COLVIN MAKES A DISCOVERY.

"Gert."

"Baas?"

"Saddle up Aasvogel after breakfast. I am going over to Krantz Kop."

Thus Colvin Kershaw to his henchman, Gert Bondelzwart. The latter was a
bastard Griqua--an elderly man, of good height and powerful build. He
had taken part in the Langeberg rising, but had been "slim" enough to
slip away just in time, and had contrived to put a large section of
country between himself and the scene of his former misdeeds. At this
man Colvin's neighbours looked askew. He had "schelm" writ large all
over his yellow personality, they declared. Colvin himself thought them
likely to be right; but then Gert suited him. He was a good servant,
and had never given him any trouble. Moreover, he had an idea that the
fellow had, for some unaccountable reason, conceived an attachme