"Don't forget where you said you would come with me--to see Carol and
the others." Christine wondered if old Sophy was one of the others,
and, even in the noontide heat, she felt a chill.

"All right, Roddy," she agreed slowly. "Wait till I get a sunshade,
though. It is dreadfully hot."

She shaded him as much as herself while they threaded their way through
the shrubs that seemed to simmer in the grey-brown heat.

Almost every South African farm has its private cemetery. It is the
custom to bury the dead where they have lived, and often the graveyard
is in the shadiest corner of the garden, where the women sit to sew,
the men bring their pipes, and children spread their playthings upon
the flat, roughly hewn tombstones.

At Blue Aloes, the place of the dead was hidden far from the haunts of
the living, but the narrow, uncertain path led to it at last--a bare,
sun-bleached spot, secluded but unshaded by a gaudy-blossomed hedge of
cactus. A straight, single line of graves, less than a dozen in
number, lay blistering in the sunshine. Some were marked with slabs of
lime-worn [Transcriber's note: time-worn?] stone, upon whose faded
lettering little green rock-lizards were disporting themselves. The
last two in the line had white marble crosses at their heads, each
bearing a name in black letters, and a date. The preceding one, too,
was fairly new, with the earth heaped in still unbroken lumps upon it,
but it bore no distinguishing mark of any kind. Death appeared to have
been fairly busy in recent times at Blue Aloes. The date on the end
grave was no older than six months.

Little Bernard Quentin van Cannan lay there, sleeping too soon at the
age of three and a half. Roddy pronounced his brief but sufficiently
eloquent epitaph.

"He was Coral's twin. A tarantula bit him--one of the awful big
poisonous ones out of the aloe hedge."

The next cross registered the resting-place of Carol Quentin van
Cannan--drowned a year back, at the age of nine. Christine's sad gaze
travelled to the third and unmarked mound.

"Is that Sophy's grave?" she asked softly, for shrivelling on the lumps
of earth lay a bunch of poppies that she had seen Roddy gathering the
day before, and now remembered wondering where he had disappeared to
afterward. Roddy did not answer. He was staring before him with
manful eyes that winked rapidly but shed no tears. His lips were
pursed up as if to whistle, yet made no sound. At the sig