“Father,” I said, “I may never marry Marie, but I don’t think that Hernando Pereira ever will either.”

“Why not, my boy?”

“Because she loves me, father, and she is not one to change.  I believe that she would rather die.”

“Then she must be a very unusual sort of woman.  Still, it may be so; the future will tell to those who live to see it.  I can only pray and trust that whatever happens will be for the best for both of you.  She is a sweet girl and I like her well, although she may be Boer—­or French.  And now, Allan, we have talked enough, and you had better go to sleep.  You must not excite yourself, you know, or it may set up new inflammation in the wound.”

“Go to sleep.  Must not excite yourself.”  I kept muttering those words for hours, serving them up in my mind with a spice of bitter thought.  At last torpor, or weakness, overcame me, and I fell into a kind of net of bad dreams which, thank Heaven!  I have now forgotten.  Yet when certain events happened subsequently I always thought, and indeed still think, that these or something like them, had been a part of those evil dreams.

On the morning following this conversation I was at length allowed to be carried to the stoep, where they laid me down, wrapped in a very dirty blanket, upon a rimpi-strung bench or primitive sofa.  When I had satisfied my first delight at seeing the sun and breathing the fresh air, I began to study my surroundings.  In front of the house, or what remained of it, so arranged that the last of them at either end we made fast to the extremities of the stoep, was arranged an arc of wagons, placed as they are in a laager and protected underneath by earth thrown up in a mound and by boughs of the mimosa thorn.  Evidently these wagons, in which the guard of Boers and armed natives who still remained on the place slept at night, were set thus as a defence against a possible attack by the Quabies or other Kaffirs.

During the daytime, however, the centre wagon was drawn a little on one side to leave a kind of gate.  Through this opening I saw that a long wall, also semicircular, had been built outside of them, enclosing a space large enough to contain at night all the cattle and horses that were left to the Heer Marais, together with those of his friends, who evidently did not wish to see their oxen vanish into the depths of the mountains.  In the middle of this extemporised kraal was a long, low mound, which, as I learned afterwards, contained the dead who fell in the attack on the house.  The two slaves who had been killed in the defence were buried in the little garden that Marie had made, and the headless body of Leblanc in a small walled place to the right of the stead, where lay some of its former owners and one or two relatives of the Heer Marais, including his wife.

Whilst I was noting these things Marie appeared at the end of the veranda, having come round the burnt part of the house, followed by Hernan Pereira.  Catching sight of me, she ran to the side of my couch with outstretched arms as though she intended to embrace me.  Then seeming to remember, stopped suddenly at my side, coloured to her hair, and said in an embarrassed voice: