ard, helped to swell the chorus of Nature's
evensong.

"There are a sight too many of these small birds," observed Bayfield.
"They want keeping down. Sonny's getting lazy with that air-gun of his.
They'll play the mischief with the garden if he gives them much more
rope. There he is, the _schepsel_. Hi! Sonny!" he called out, as a
good-looking boy came down the path to meet them. "Why don't you thin
off some of these birds? Look at 'em all. No one would think you'd got
an air-gun and half a dozen catapults."

"The gun's out of order, father," answered the boy.

"It's always getting out of order. Those air-guns are frauds. Where's
Lyn?"

"She was about just now. We watched you from beyond the third gate.
There she is."

Following his gaze they descried a white-clad feminine form in front of
the house, which they were now very near.

CHAPTER FOUR.

LYN.

"Well, Mr Blachland, what luck have you had?"

The speaker was standing on the stoep, whither she had come out to meet
them. She was rather a tall girl, with a great deal of golden hair,
arranged in some wonderful way of her own which somehow enhanced its
volume without appearing loose or untidy. She had blue eyes which
looked forth straight and frank, and an exquisite skin, which even the
fierce glare of the summer sun, and a great deal of open-air life had
not in the least roughened, and of which a few tiny freckles, rather
adding piquancy to a sweetly pretty face, oval, refined and full of
character, were the only trace. If there was a fault to be found in the
said face, it was that its owner showed her gums slightly when she
laughed--but the laugh was so bright, so whole-hearted, and lighted up
the whole expression so entrancingly that all but the superlatively
hypercritical lost sight of the defect altogether.

"He's bowled over that thundering big bushbuck ram we've been trying for
so often in Siever's Kloof, Lyn," answered her father for his guest.

"Well done!" cried the girl. "You know, Mr Blachland, some of the
people around here were becoming quite superstitious about that buck.
They were beginning to declare he couldn't be killed. I suggested a
silver bullet such as they had to make for those supernatural stags in
the old German legends."

"A charge of treble A was good enough this time--no, I think I used
loepers," laughed Blachland.

"I almost began to believe in it myself," went on the girl. "Some of
our best shots arou