ried. "Surely
you have ill treated an old man enough."

Nobody stirred, not even Frank Muller, who was gazing at her
tear-stained face with a fierce smile playing round the corners of his
clean-cut mouth, which his beard was trimmed to show.

"It will pass, Miss Bessie," he said; "it will pass. I have often seen
such fits. They come from too much excitement, or too much drink----"

Suddenly he broke off with an exclamation, and pointed to the house,
from the roof of which pale curls of blue smoke were rising.

"Who has fired the house?" he shouted. "By Heaven! I will shoot the
man."

The Boers wheeled round staring in astonishment, and as they gazed the
tinderlike roof burst into a red sheet of flame that grew and gathered
breadth and height with an almost marvellous rapidity. Just then, too,
a light breeze sprang up from over the hill at the rear of the house,
as it sometimes did at this time of the day, and bent the flames over
towards them in an immense arch of fire, so that the fumes and heat and
smoke began to beat upon their faces.

"Oh, the house is burning down!" cried Bessie, utterly bewildered by
this new misfortune.

"Here, you!" shouted Muller to the gaping Boers, "go and see if anything
can be saved. Phew! we must get out of this," and, stooping down, he
lifted Silas Croft in his arms and walked away with him, followed by
Bessie, towards the plantation on their left, the same spot where Jantje
had taken refuge. In the centre of this plantation was a little glade
surrounded by young orange and blue-gum trees. Here he laid the old
man down upon a bed of dead leaves and soft springing grass, and then
hurried away without a word to the fire, only to find that the house
was already utterly unapproachable. Such was the rapidity with which the
flames did their work upon the mass of dry straw and the wooden roof and
floorings beneath, that in fifteen minutes the whole of the interior of
the house was a glowing incandescent pile, and in half an hour it was
completely gutted, nothing being left standing but the massive outer
walls of stone, over which a dense column of smoke hung like a pall.
Mooifontein was a blackened ruin; only the stables and outhouses, which
were roofed with galvanised iron, remained uninjured.

Frank Muller had not been gone five minutes when, to Bessie's joy, her
uncle opened his eyes and sat up.

"What is it? what is it?" he said. "Ah! I recollect. What is all this
smell of fire? S