reamed she heard the tapping and the whispers, and smelled the
evil odour. Why should a _Thing_ come and tell her to mind the
children? "_Mind the boy._" He was already minded--they were all
happy and well cared for in their own home. The boy Roderick must have
been dreaming, too, and talking in his sleep. Thus, Christine's clear
English mind rejected the whole thing as an illusion, resulting from
weariness and the new, strange conditions of her life. Yet there was
an Irish side to her that could not so easily dispose of the matter.
She remembered with what uneasiness her nights had been haunted from
the first. How always, when the dark fell, she had sensed something
uncanny, something unseen and menacing, that she could never track to
its source. But tonight the sense of hovering evil had taken definite
form and direction. It was at the children that harm was directed; the
whistling, sighing words had concerned the children only. The girl
shivered again at the horrid recollection.

"Yet anything that cares about children cannot be altogether evil," she
thought. That comforted her a little, but the spell of horror the
night had laid upon her was not lifted until dawn came. Then she
slipped on some clothes and let herself out into the morning air.

The garden that straggled about the farm was composed of a dozen
century-old oaks, a sprinkling of feathery pepper-trees, and many
clumps of brilliant-blossomed cacti. The veranda and outbuildings were
heavily hung with creepers, and great barrels of begonias and geraniums
stood about. Within a few hundred yards of the house, the green and
glowing cultivation stopped as abruptly as the edges of an oasis in the
desert, and the Karoo began--that sweeping, high table-land, empty of
all but brown stones, long white thorns, fantastically shaped clumps of
prickly-pear, bare brown hills, and dried-up rivulets, and that yet is
one of the healthiest and, from the farmer's point of view, wealthiest
plateaux in the world.

Between the farm and the far hills arose a curious line of shroudy
blue, seeming to hover round the estate, mystically encircling it, and
cutting it off from the rest of the desert. This was the century-old
hedge of blue aloes which gave the farm its name. Planted in a huge
ring of many miles' circumference, the great spiked cacti, with leaves
thick and flat as hide shields, and pointed as steel spears, made a
barrier against cattle, ostriches, and hu