"You kid, go there. You kid, fetch this or bring that. You kid, go to the
drift for water, or take the besom and sweep the stoep, or scrub out the
room there--do you hear, you kid?" These orders came thick and fast when
at last she was old enough to work; and she was old enough when she was
very young, and did work like a little beast of burden. A real mother's
heart--all mothers are not real ones--would have ached to see the dirt and
bruises on the delicate childish limbs, and the vermin that crawled under
the yellow rings of hair. How to be clean and tidy nobody had ever shown
her, though she had learned by instinct other things.

That it was best to bear hunger and pain in silence, lest worse befell.
That a truth for which one suffers is not as good as a lie for which one
gets a bigger roaster-cake, or the scrapings of the syrup-can. That to
little, weak, and feeble creatures of their race grown human beings can be
marvellously cruel. That the devil lived down in the kraals with the
natives, and that God was a swear. It is a wonder that she had not sunk
into idiocy, or hopelessly sickened and died, neglected, ill-used,
half-starved as she was. But when the little one might have been six years
of age, the Lady began coming. And after the first time, with very brief
intervals of absence, she came every night.

V

As soon as you lay down on the sack of straw in the corner of the
outhouse, slipping out of the ragged frock if the weather were hot, or
pulling the thin old horse-blanket over you if the night were a cold one,
keeping your eyes tight shut, for this was quite indispensable, you looked
into the thick dark, shot with gleams of lovely colours, sometimes with
whirling rings of stars, and gradually, as you looked, all these
concentrated into two stars, large and not twinkling, but softly radiant,
and you were happy, for you knew that the Lady was coming.

For she always came, even when you had been most wicked: when you were
sent to bed without even the supper-crust to gnaw, and when your body and
arms and legs were bruised and aching from the beating they told you you
deserved. The stars would go a long way off, and while you tingled and
trembled and panted with expectation, would come back again as eyes.
Looking up into them, you saw them clearly; the rest of the person they
belonged to arrived quite a little while after her eyes were there. Such
eyes--neither grey, nor brown, nor violet, but a mingling