round. And, I hoped--very strongly hoped--
I would soon be in a position to help one of them at any rate duly to
forget it.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

What an ultra-celestial gleam there was in the newly-risen sun, which
had now just soared free of the further hills, deepening the cloudless
blue into a richer depth! What a ring of joyousness in the varying bird
notes, tossed from spray to spray and from tree to tree, over the wide
free expanse! Even the distant voices of the farm Kafirs, and the bleat
of the flocks, seemed to my wrought-up brain to take on a very
gladsomeness of tone. By that time to-morrow Beryl would be home again,
and even before then I should have seen her, sweet, fresh and radiant in
the rose-glow of the early morning.

All this ran through my mind, and kept me silent; but there was no need
to talk, for Revell was a host in himself in that line, and now he was
launching forth by the hour, mostly as to the affair which had just met
with so fortunate a conclusion, unflattering comments upon the laws of
the Colony in general, and their administrator, Shattuck, in particular.
Then, after an early breakfast, Brian inspanned, and with a few parting
injunctions from his father, drove off.

Revell, naturally enough, was in no hurry to move on, and in my then
mood his ceaseless, if harmless, chatter annoyed me. There was nothing
particular to be done about the homestead, so I saddled up a horse for a
ride round the veldt. I might get a shot at something, but that was a
secondary consideration. I wanted to be alone and think.

Very rose-tinted was the reverie in which I was wrapped, as my steed
paced on, over swelling rise or through bushed valley bottom. I went
back over all the time I had spent in this happy home. I thought of her
whose presence had brightened it, and called to mind all manner of
little circumstances which now stood out in anything but a discouraging
light. Why, even to-morrow might decide everything, given the
opportunity, and that I would endeavour to make. And somehow or other I
felt strangely buoyant as to the result.

For all the use I made of it I might as well have left my gun at home,
yet it was for no lack of chances. A pair of vaal koorhaans rose almost
beneath the horse's feet--rare chance indeed at these wary and beautiful
birds, themselves all too scarce in our locality--yet I merely watched
them as they winged