my sheep, and I see her face
before me, and I stand and let the sheep run by. I look at you, and in
your smile, a something at the corner of your lips, I see her. How can I
forget her when, whenever I turn, she is there, and not there? I cannot,
I will not, live where I do not see her.

"I know what you think," he said, turning upon her. "You think I am mad;
you think I am going to see whether she will not like me! I am not so
foolish. I should have known at first she never could suffer me. Who am
I, what am I, that she should look at me? It was right that she left me;
right that she should not look at me. If any one says it is not, it is
a lie! I am not going to speak to her," he added--"only to see her; only
to stand sometimes in a place where she has stood before."

Chapter 2.XI. An Unfinished Letter.

Gregory Rose had been gone seven months. Em sat alone on a white
sheepskin before the fire.

The August night-wind, weird and shrill, howled round the chimneys and
through the crannies, and in walls and doors, and uttered a long low cry
as it forced its way among the clefts of the stones on the kopje. It was
a wild night. The prickly-pear tree, stiff and upright as it held
its arms, felt the wind's might, and knocked its flat leaves heavily
together, till great branches broke off. The Kaffers, as they slept in
their straw huts, whispered one to another that before morning there
would not be an armful of thatch left on the roofs; and the beams of the
wagon-house creaked and groaned as if it were heavy work to resist the
importunity of the wind.

Em had not gone to bed. Who could sleep on a night like this? So in the
dining room she had lighted a fire, and sat on the ground before it,
turning the roaster-cakes that lay on the coals to bake. It would save
work in the morning; and she blew out the light because the wind through
the window-chinks made it flicker and run; and she sat singing to
herself as she watched the cakes. They lay at one end of the wide
hearth on a bed of coals, and at the other end a fire burnt up steadily,
casting its amber glow over Em's light hair and black dress, with
the ruffle of crepe about the neck, and over the white curls of the
sheepskin on which she sat.

Louder and more fiercely yet howled the storm; but Em sang on, and
heard nothing but the words of her song, and heard them only faintly, as
something restful. It was an old, childish song she had often heard her
mother sing lo