of tired dancers,
and passed out at the front door. On the stoep a group of men and boys
were smoking, peeping in at the windows, and cracking coarse jokes.
Waldo was certainly not among them, and she made her way to the carts
and wagons drawn up at some distance from the homestead.

"Waldo," she said, peering into a large cart, "is that you? I am so
dazed with the tallow candles, I see nothing."

He had made himself a place between the two seats. She climbed up and
sat on the sloping floor in front.

"I thought I should find you here," she said, drawing her skirt up about
her shoulders. "You must take me home presently, but not now."

She leaned her head on the seat near to his, and they listened in
silence to the fitful twanging of the fiddles as the night-wind bore it
from the farmhouse, and to the ceaseless thud of the dancers, and the
peals of gross laughter. She stretched out her little hand to feel for
his.

"It is so nice to lie here and hear that noise," she said. "I like to
feel that strange life beating up against me. I like to realise forms
of life utterly unlike mine." She drew a long breath. "When my own life
feels small, and I am oppressed with it, I like to crush together, and
see it in a picture, in an instant, a multitude of disconnected unlike
phases of human life--a mediaeval monk with his string of beads pacing
the quiet orchard, and looking up from the grass at his feet to
the heavy fruit-trees; little Malay boys playing naked on a shining
sea-beach; a Hindoo philosopher alone under his banyan tree, thinking,
thinking, thinking, so that in the thought of God he may lose himself;
a troop of Bacchanalians dressed in white, with crowns of vine-leaves,
dancing along the Roman streets; a martyr on the night of his death
looking through the narrow window to the sky, and feeling that already
he has the wings that shall bear him up" (she moved her hand dreamily
over her face); "an epicurean discoursing at a Roman bath to a knot of
his disciples on the nature of happiness; a Kaffer witchdoctor seeking
for herbs by moonlight, while from the huts on the hillside come the
sound of dogs barking, and the voices of women and children; a mother
giving bread-and-milk to her children in little wooden basins and
singing the evening song. I like to see it all; I feel it run through
me--that life belongs to me; it makes my little life larger, it breaks
down the narrow walls that shut me in."

She sighed, and dr