you haven't," she assented with the shadow of a smile. "So let me
go my own way with a good grace. Besides, with old Josane to look after
me, I can't come to much harm."

She had telegraphed to her late husband's manager at Swaanepoel's Hoek,
requesting him to send the old cattle-herd to her at once. Three days
later Josane arrived, and having commissioned Hoste to buy her a few
cows and some slaughter sheep, enough to supply her modest household.
Eanswyth had carried out her somewhat eccentric plan.

The utter loneliness of the place--the entire absence of life--the empty
kraals and the silent homestead, all this is inexpressibly grateful to
her crushed and lacerated spirit. And in the dead silence of those
uninhabited rooms she conjures up the sweetest, the holiest memories.
Her solitude, her complete isolation, conveys no terror--no spark of
misgiving, for it is there that her very life has been lived. The dead
stillness of the midnight hour, the ghostly creaking of a board, the
hundred and one varying sounds begotten of silence and darkness, inspire
her with no alarm, for her imagination peoples these empty and deserted
rooms with life once more.

She can see him as she saw him in life, moving about the place on
different errands bent. There is his favourite chair; there his place
at the table. His personality seems still to pervade the whole house,
his spirit to hover around her, to permeate her whole being, here as it
could nowhere else. But it was on first entering his room, which still
contained a few possessions too cumbersome or too worthless to carry
away--a trunk or two and a few old clothes--here it was that that awful
and vivid contrast struck her in overwhelming force.

What an expression there is in such poor and useless relics--a glove, a
boot, a hat, even an old pipe--when we know we shall never see the owner
again, parted perhaps by circumstances, by distance, by death. Do not
such things seem verily to speak--and to speak eloquently--to bring
before our eyes, to sound within our ears, the vision, the voice of one
whom we shall never behold again? Ah! do they not!

Standing for the first time alone in that room, Eanswyth felt as though
her heart had been broken afresh. She fell prone among those poor and
worthless relics, pressing them passionately to her lips, while her
tears fell like rain. If ever her lover's spirit could come back to
her, surely it would be in that room.

"O Eus