“Are you the little Allan Quatermain who is coming to learn French with me?” she asked in Dutch.

“Of course,” I answered in the same tongue, which I knew well; “but why do you call me little, missie?  I am taller than you,” I added indignantly, for when I was young my lack of height was always a sore point with me.

“I think not,” she replied.  “But get off that horse, and we will measure here against this wall.”

So I dismounted, and, having assured herself that I had no heels to my boots (I was wearing the kind of raw-hide slippers that the Boers call “veld-shoon"), she took the writing slate which she was carrying—­it had no frame, I remember, being, in fact, but a piece of the material used for roofing—­and, pressing it down tight on my stubbly hair, which stuck up then as now, made a deep mark in the soft sandstone of the wall with the hard pointed pencil.

“There,” she said, “that is justly done.  Now, little Allan, it is your turn to measure me.”

So I measured her, and, behold! she was the taller by a whole half-inch.

“You are standing on tiptoe,” I said in my vexation.

“Little Allan,” she replied, “to stand on tiptoe would be to lie before the good Lord, and when you come to know me better you will learn that, though I have a dreadful temper and many other sins, I do not lie.”

I suppose that I looked snubbed and mortified, for she went on in her grave, grown-up way:  “Why are you angry because God made me taller than you? especially as I am whole months older, for my father told me so.  Come, let us write our names against these marks, so that in a year or two you may see how you outgrow me.”  Then with the slate pencil she scratched “Marie” against her mark very deeply, so that it might last, she said; after which I wrote “Allan” against mine.

Alas!  Within the last dozen years chance took me past Maraisfontein once more.  The house had long been rebuilt, but this particular wall yet stood.  I rode to it and looked, and there faintly could still be seen the name Marie, against the little line, and by it the mark that I had made.  My own name and with it subsequent measurements were gone, for in the intervening forty years or so the sandstone had flaked away in places.  Only her autograph remained, and when I saw it I think that I felt even worse than I did on finding whose was the old Bible that I had bought upon the market square at Maritzburg.

I know that I rode away hurriedly without even stopping to inquire into whose hands the farm had passed.  Through the peach orchard I rode, where the trees—­perhaps the same, perhaps others—­were once more in bloom, for the season of the year was that when Marie and I first met, nor did I draw rein for half a score of miles.

But here I may state that Marie always stayed just half an inch the taller in body, and how much taller in mind and spirit I cannot tell.