u have
over-persuaded me. I don't know what is happening to me," she added,
with a little stamp and a sudden filling of her eyes with tears, "I do
not seem to have any will of my own left. When I want to do one thing
and you want me to do another it is I who have to do what you want; and
I tell you I don't like it, Captain Niel, and I shall be very cross out
walking;" and sweeping past him, on her way to fetch her hat, in that
peculiarly graceful fashion which angry women can sometimes assume, she
left John to reflect that he never saw a more charming or taking lady in
Europe or out of it.

He had half a mind to risk it and ask her to marry him. But then,
perhaps, she might refuse him, and that was a contingency which he did
not quite appreciate. After their first youth few men altogether relish
the idea of putting themselves in a position that gives a capricious
woman an opportunity of first figuratively "jumping" on them, and
then perhaps holding them up to the scorn and obloquy of her friends,
relations, and other admirers. For, unfortunately, until the opposite is
clearly demonstrated, many men are apt to believe that not a few women
are by nature capricious, shallow, and unreliable; and John Niel,
owing, possibly, to that unhappy little experience of his youth, must be
reckoned among their misguided ranks.

CHAPTER XII

OVER IT

On leaving the house Bessie and John took their way down the long avenue
of blue gums. This avenue was old Silas Croft's particular pride, since
although it had only been planted for about twenty years, the trees,
which in the divine climate and virgin soil of the Transvaal grow at the
most extraordinary rate, were for the most part very lofty, and as thick
in the stem as English oaks of a hundred and fifty years' standing. The
avenue was not over wide, and the trees were planted quite close one to
another, with the result that their brown, pillar-like stems shot up for
many feet without a branch, whilst high overhead the boughs crossed and
intermingled in such a way as to form a leafy tunnel, through which the
landscape beyond appeared as though through a telescope.

Down this charming avenue John and Bessie walked, and on reaching its
limit they turned to the right and followed a little footpath winding in
and out of the rocks that built up the plateau on the hillside whereon
the house stood. Presently this led them through the orchard; then came
a bare strip of veldt, a very da