unvarying plan to suit the petty wants and
hopes of individual mortality. Jess was a clever woman, but it would
take a wiser head than hers to know where or when to draw that red line
across the writings of our lives.

On came the cart and the knot of men, then suddenly John looked up and
saw her gazing at him with those dark eyes that at times did indeed
seem as though they were the windows of her soul. He turned and said
something to his companions and to the Zulu Mouti, who went on with the
cart, then he came towards her smiling and with outstretched hand.

"How do you do, Jess?" he said. "So I have found you all right?"

She took his hand and answered, almost angrily, "Why have you come? Why
did you leave Bessie and my uncle?"

"I came because I was sent, also because I wished it. I wanted to bring
you back home before Pretoria was besieged."

"You must have been mad! How could you expect to get back? We shall both
be shut up here together now."

"So it appears. Well, things might be worse," he added cheerfully.

"I do not think that anything could be worse," she answered with a stamp
of her foot, then, quite thrown off her balance, she burst incontinently
into a flood of tears.

John Niel was a very simple-minded man, and it never struck him to
attribute her grief to any other cause than anxiety at the state of
affairs and at her incarceration for an indefinite period in a besieged
town that ran the daily risk of being taken _vi et armis_. Still he was
a little hurt at the manner of his reception after his long and most
perilous journey, which is not, perhaps, to be wondered at.

"Well, Jess," he said, "I think that you might speak a little more
kindly to me, considering--considering all things. There, don't cry,
they are all right at Mooifontein, and I dare say that we shall win back
there somehow some time or other. I had a nice business to get here at
all, I can tell you."

Suddenly she stopped weeping and smiled, her tears passing away like a
summer storm. "How did you get through?" she asked. "Tell me all about
it, Captain Niel," and accordingly he did.

She listened in silence while he sketched the chief events of his
journey, and when he had done she spoke in quite a changed tone.

"It is very good and kind of you to have risked your life like this for
me. Only I wonder that you did not all of you see that it would be of no
use. We shall both be shut up here together now, that is all, and that