of the hardiest among the
flock, by nightfall of the following day Renshaw Fanning was left
without a hoof upon the farm.

CHAPTER NINE.

TWO "SELLS."

"Heard anything of Renshaw?" said Christopher Selwood, coming in hot and
tired from his work, for a cup of tea late in the afternoon.

"Not a word," answered his wife, looking up from the last of a batch of
letters that had just come in with the weekly post. "Why--you don't
think--?" she began, alarmed at the grave look which had come over her
husband's face.

"Well, I don't know," he replied. "I hope there's nothing seriously
wrong. How long is it since you wrote?"

"More than a fortnight now."

"Ah, well. I dare say it's all right. Now I think of it, they've had
big rains up that end of the country. Big rains mean big floods, and
big floods mean all the drifts impassable. The post carts may have been
delayed for days."

"You think that's it?" she said anxiously.

"Why, yes. At first, I own, I felt a bit of a scare. You see, the poor
chap was desperately ill when he wrote--though, to be sure, he must have
got over the worst even then--and I've been feeling a little anxious
about him of late. Well, he'll come when he can, and bring his friend
with him, I hope. It'll liven the girls up, too. Miss Avory must be
getting properly tired of having no one to flirt with."

The soft afternoon air floated in through the open windows in balmy
puffs, bringing with it a scent of flowers, of delicate jessamine twined
round the pillars of the _stoep_, of rich roses now bursting into full
bloom. A long-waisted hornet rocketed to and fro just beneath the
ceiling, knocking his apparently idiotic head against the same, and the
twittering of finks darting in and out of their pendulous nests above
the dam in all their habitual fussiness, mingled with the melodious
whistle of spreuws holding contraband revel among the fast-ripening figs
in the garden.

For a few minutes Mrs Selwood plied her sewing-machine in silence,
then--

"Talking of Violet, Chris, did it never occur to you that she had flung
her net over poor Renshaw?"

"Flung her net--Renshaw! No, by Jove, it never did! Why, he's the most
sober-going old chap in the world. Confound it, he must be past that
sort of thing--if he ever went in for it. Why, he's only two or three
years my junior."

"And what if he is?" was the reply of calm superiority. "He needn't be
Methuselah for all that. And th