Her face is pale, but as full of sunlight as of
shadow, and her eyes are really grey and deep as mountain lakes. The
sorrow of all the world and all its joy seem to have rolled over her like
many waters, and when she smiles the sweetness of it is always almost more
than the Kid can bear.

Who is the Lady!

She has no other name than that. She is very, very good, as well as
beautiful, and you can bear to tell her when you have been most wicked,
because she is so sorry for you. She can play with you, and laugh so
softly and clearly and gaily that you, who have never learned but to dread
grown people's cruel merriment, join in and laugh too. When she laughs the
corners of her eyes crinkle so like the corners of her lips that you have
to kiss them, and there are dimples that come with the laughter, and make
her dearer than ever.

Who is the Lady, tall, and strong, and tender? That dead woman lying out
there under the Little Kopje was small, and slight, and frail. Who may the
Lady be? Is she a dream or a mere illusion born of loneliness and
starvation, physical and mental? Or has Mary, the Mother of Pity, laid
aside her girdle of decades of golden roses, her mantle of glory, and her
diadem of stars, and come stepping fair-footed down the stairway that
Night builds between Earth and Heaven, to comfort a desolate child lying
in a stable who never heard the story of the Christ-Babe of Bethlehem?

You ask no questions--you to whom she comes. You call her softly at night,
stretching out your arms, and the clasp of her arms answers at once. You
whisper how you love her, with your face hidden in her neck. The great
kind dark that brings her is your real, real daytime in which you live and
are glad. Each morning to which you waken, bringing its stint of hunger
and abuse and blows renewed, is only a dreadful dream, you say to
yourself, and so can face your world.

Oh, deep beyond fathoming, mysterious beyond comprehension is the hidden
heart of a child!

VI

One afternoon when the Kid was quite as tall as the broom she swept the
stoep with she had gone to the drift for water. It was a still, bright,
hot day. Little puffs of rosy cloud hung motionless under the burning blue
sky-arch; small, gaily-plumaged birds twittered in the bushes; the tiny
black ants scurried to and fro in the pinkish sand of the river beach. She
waded into the now clear, sherry-pale water to cool her hot bare limbs,
and, bending over, stared dow