“I will tell you.  It was the white medicine-man who lives here; he who cut me open.  He arranged it all a few days ago because he hates you.  Last night he rode to tell the impi when to come.”

“When is it to come?” I asked, holding the jug of water towards him.

“To-night at the rising of the moon, so that it may get far away before the dawn.  My people are thirsty for your blood and for that of the other white chief, because you killed so many of them by the river.  The others they will not harm.”

“How did you learn all this?” I asked him again, but without result, for he became incoherent and only muttered something about being left alone because the others could not carry him.  So I gave him some water, after which he fell asleep, or pretended to do so, and I left him, wondering whether he was delirious, or spoke truth.  As I passed the stables I saw that my own horse was there, for in this district horses are always shut up at night to keep them from catching sickness, but that the four beasts that had brought Heda from Natal in the Cape cart were gone, though it was evident that they had been kraaled here till within an hour or two.  I threw my horse a bundle of forage and returned to the house by the back entrance.  The kitchen was empty, but crouched by the door of Marnham’s room sat the boy who had found him dead.  He had been attached to his master and seemed half dazed.  I asked him where the other servants were, to which he replied that they had all run away.  Then I asked him where the horses were.  He answered that the Baas Rodd had ordered them to be turned out before he rode off that morning.  I bade him accompany me to the stoep, as I dared not let him out of my sight, which he did unwillingly enough.

There I found Anscombe and Heda.  They were seated side by side upon the couch.  Tears were running down her face and he, looking very troubled, held her by the hand.  Somehow that picture of Heda has always remained fixed in my mind.  Sorrow becomes some women and she was one of them.  Her beautiful dark grey eyes did not grow red with weeping; the tears just welled up in them and fell like dewdrops from the heart of a flower.

She sat very upright and very still, as he did, looking straight in front of her, while a ray of sunshine, falling on her head, showed the chestnut-hued lights in her waving hair, of which she had a great abundance.

Indeed the pair of them, thus seated side by side, reminded me of an engraving I had seen somewhere of the statues of a husband and wife in an old Egyptian tomb.  With just such a look did the woman of thousands of years ago sit gazing in patient hope into the darkness of the future.  Death had made her sad, but it was gone by, and the little wistful smile about her lips seemed to suggest that in this darkness her sorrowful eyes already saw the stirring of the new life to be.  Moreover, was not the man she loved the companion of her hopes as he had been of her woes.  Such was the fanciful thought that sprang up in my mind, even in the midst of those great anxieties, like a single flower in a stony wilderness of thorns or one star on the blackness of the night.