is-heaps, and the finer red dust of the
streets. Kimberley dust is notoriously the worst of its kind in a land
plagued with dust. Buluwayo runs it pretty close, and Johannesburg, in
the spring months, has special sand-devils of its own, but nothing in
Africa has ever quite come up to Kimberley at its worst. This was not
one of its worst, however; merely a day on which all who had wisdom sat
at home within closed doors and sealed windows, awaiting a cessation of
the penetrating abomination of filth.

Often, during the morning, Mrs. Ozanne found herself wondering what she
was doing wandering about the town on such a day. Desultorily, and
with an odd feeling that this was not what she should be about, she let
herself be blown along the street and in and out of shops, face bent
down, eyes half closed, bumping blindly into people, her skirts
swirling and flacking, her hat striving its utmost to escape and take
the hair of her head with it. There were no necessary errands to do.
The servants did the shopping, and she rarely went out except to drive
in the afternoons. Vaguely she wondered why she had not used the
carriage this morning.

Lunch-time came, but she could not bring herself to return home. It
seemed to her that there was still something she must do, though she
could not remember what.

In the end, she went into a clean, respectable little restaurant and
lunched off a lamb chop and boiled potatoes, regardless of the
excellent lunch that awaited her at home. Then, like a restless and
unclean spirit, out she blew once more into the howling maelstrom of
wind and dust.

She began to feel, at last, as if it were a nightmare, this necessity
that urged her on, she knew not whither. Dimly, her eyes still blinded
by dust, she was aware that she had left the main thoroughfares and was
now in a poorer part of the town. With the gait of a sleep-walker, she
continued on her way, until suddenly a voice addressing her jerked her
broad-awake.

"You come see me, missis?"

A woman had opened the door of a mean tin house and stood there waiting
in the doorway, almost as if she had been expecting Sophia Ozanne. The
latter stood stone-still, but her mind went racing back to a winter
afternoon seventeen years before, when she had sat in her bedroom with
the little dying form of Rosanne upon her knees, and a voice speaking
from the shadow of her bedroom had said, "Missis sell baby to me for a
farthing; baby not die." Th