ud-walled hovel or two near
it, had a sprawling painted board across its front, signifying that the
place was the Free State Hotel. Behind it were an orchard and some fields
under rude cultivation, and a quarter of a mile to the north were the
native kraals.

At the sight the Boer shook himself fully awake, and sent the long lash
cracking over the thin, sweat-drenched backs of the ox-team. They laboured
with desperation at the yoke, and the waggon rumbled on.

The Englishman, hidden with his sorrow under the canvas waggon-tilt,
roused himself at the accelerated motion. He rose, and, holding the
sleeping child upon one arm, pushed back the front flap and looked out. He
spoke to the taciturn driver, who shook his head. How did he, Smoots
Beste, know whether a minister of the Church of England, or even a Dutch
predikant, was to be found at the place beyond? All he hoped for was that
he would be able to buy there tobacco and brandy cheap, and sleep drunken,
to wake and drink again.

The waggon halted on the brink of the kloof. Little birds of gay and
brilliant plumage, blue and crimson and emerald-green, rose in flocks from
the bush and grasses that clothed the sides of the coomb; the hollows were
full of the tree-fern; the grass had little white and purple flowers in
it. At the valley-bottom a little stream, that would be a river after the
first rains, wimpled over sandstone boulders, the barbel rose at flies.
There was a drift lower down. It was all the goaded, worn-out oxen could
do to stay the huge creaking waggons down the steep bank, and drag them
over the river-bed of sand and boulders, through the muddied, churned-up
water that they were dying for, yet not allowed to taste, and toil with
them up the farther side.

The Englishman was not cruel. He was usually humane and merciful to man
and beast, but just now he was deaf and blind. Beside him there was her
corpse, beyond him was her grave, beyond that....

Both he and she, in that world that lay beyond the barrier had observed
the outward forms of Christianity. They had first met in the Park, one May
morning, after a church parade. They sat on a couple of green-painted
chairs while Society, conscious of the ever-present newspaper-reporter,
paraded past them in plumage as gorgeous as that of the gay-coloured birds
that flocked among the tree-fern or rose in frightened clouds as the
waggons crashed by. And they discussed--together with the chances of the
runners e