put it down to the effect of the
weather upon her physically. It did undoubtedly try her very
severely. Though the exercise that she compelled herself to take
had restored to her the power to sleep, she always felt as weary
when she arose as when she lay down. The heat and the drought
combined to wear her out. Valiantly though she struggled to rally
her flagging energies, the effort became increasingly difficult.
She lived in the depths of a great depression, against which,
strive as she might, she ever strove in vain. She was furious with
herself for her failure, but it pursued her relentlessly. She
found the Kaffir servants more than usually idle and difficult to
deal with, and this added yet further to the burden that weighed
her down.

One day, returning from a ride to find Fair Rosamond swabbing the
floor of the _stoep_ with her bath-sponge, she lost her temper
completely and wholly unexpectedly, and cut the girl across her
naked shoulders with her riding-switch. It was done in a moment--a
single, desperate moment of unbearable exasperation. Rosamond
screamed and fled, upsetting her pail inadvertently over her
mistress's feet as she went. And Sylvia, with a burning sense of
shame for her violence, retreated as precipitately to her own room.

She entered by the window, and, not even noticing that the door
into the sitting-room stood ajar, flung herself down by the table
in a convulsion of tears. She hated herself for her action, she
hated Rosamond for having been the cause of it. She hated the
blazing sky and the parched earth, the barren _veldt_, the
imprisoning _kopjes_, the hopeless sense of oppression, of being
always somehow in the wrong. A wild longing to escape was upon
her, to go anywhere--anywhere, so long as she could get right away
from that intolerable weight of misgiving, doubt, dissatisfaction,
foreboding, that hung like a galling chain upon her.

She was getting like Mrs. Merston, she told herself passionately.
Already her youth had gone, and all that made life worth living was
going with it. She had made her desperate bid for happiness, and
she had lost. And Burke--Burke was only watching for her hour of
weakness to make himself even more completely her master than he
was already. Had he not only that morning--only that
morning--gruffly ordered her back from a distant cattle-run that
she had desired to inspect? Was he not always asserting his
authority in some fashion over her, c