ther was a thorough Englishman,
with nothing of the Boer about him, moreover he married an English
lady, the daughter of a Natal colonist, and for these reasons he and his
grandmother did not get on very well.

After I had finished my schooling I used to stay with friends in Durban,
the parents of one of my schoolfellows, and it was at their house that
I met my husband, Mr. Ralph Mackenzie, who then was called Lord
Glenthirsk, his father having died about six months previous to our
acquaintance.

Ralph, my husband, was then quite young, only three-and-twenty indeed,
and a subaltern in a Scotch regiment which was quartered at Durban,
whither it had come from India. As the term of this regiment's foreign
service was shortly to expire, and as at the time there was a prospect
of further troubles in South Africa, my husband did not resign his
commission on succeeding to the peerage, as his mother wished him to
do, for he said that this was a step which he could consider when the
regiment returned home, as it would do shortly.

Well, we met, and since we are now quite old married people I may as
well admit at once that we fell in love with each other, though to me it
seemed a marvellous thing that this handsome and brilliant young lord,
with his great wealth and all the world before him, should come to care
for a simple Dutch girl who had little to recommend her except her
looks (of which my great-grandmother thought, or pretended to think, so
little) and some small inheritance of South African farms and cattle.
Indeed, when at last he proposed to me, begging me to be his wife, as
though I were the most precious thing on the whole earth, I told him
so plainly, having inherited some sense with my strain of Huguenot and
Dutch blood, and though I trembled at the risk I ran, when everything
lay in my own hand, I refused to become engaged to him until he had
obtained the consent of his mother and relations, or, at the least,
until he had taken a year to think the matter over.

The truth is that, although I was still so young I had seen and heard
enough of the misfortunes of unsuitable marriages, nor could I bear that
it should ever be said of me that I had taken advantage of some passing
fancy to entangle a man so far above me in wealth and station. Therefore
I would permit him to say nothing of our engagement, nor did I speak a
single word of it to my great-grandmother or my friends. Still Ralph and
I saw a great deal of each