these, would return, trailing after her armfuls of rare blooms, and thenceforward, until these faded, the ridgy grave-mound and the heaped cairn of boulders would be gay with them. She never took them to the house. It might have meant a beating—so many things did.

Late in November, when the apricots and plums and peaches were ripening on the laden, starling-haunted boughs, she would wander in the orchard belonging to the house, while the heavy drenching rains drummed on the leaves overhead, and sudden furious thunderstorms rent the livid-coloured clouds above with jagged scythes and reaping-hooks of white electric fire, or leaping, dancing, playing, vanishing tongues of thin blue. Once this fire struck a krantz, under the lee of which the child was sheltering, and made a black scorched mark all down the cliff-face, but left the child unscathed.

No one had ever taught her anything; no one had ever laid a gentle hand upon her. When she first saw mother and daughter, friend and friend, sweetheart and sweetheart kiss, it seemed to her that they licked each other, as friendly dogs do. She had no name that she knew of.

"You kid, go there. You kid, fetch this or bring that. You kid, go to the drift for water, or take the besom and sweep the stoep, or scrub out the room there—do you hear, you kid?" These orders came thick and fast when at last she was old enough to work; and she was old enough when she was very young, and did work like a little beast of burden. A real mother's heart—all mothers are not real ones—would have ached to see the dirt and bruises on the delicate childish limbs, and the vermin that crawled under the yellow rings of hair. How to be clean and tidy nobody had ever shown her, though she had learned by instinct other things.

That it was best to bear hunger and pain in silence, lest worse befell. That a truth for which one suffers is not as good as a lie for which one gets a bigger roaster-cake, or the scrapings of the syrup-can. That to little, weak, and feeble creatures of their race grown human beings can be marvellously cruel. That the devil lived down in the kraals with the natives, and that God was a swear. It is a wonder that she had not sunk into idiocy, or hopelessly sickened and died, neglected, ill-used, half-starved as she was. But when the little one might have been six years of age, the Lady began coming. And after the first time, with very brief intervals of absence, she came every night.