'And I do want
you to pray with me, dear. Put your head down, dear, and
let me whisper to you.'

"She soothed him gently and sweetly, buttressing his
weakness with her love. How can I know what she said or
what he answered? She wrought upon him with the kind arts
God gives a woman to pay her for being a woman, and soon
she had softened something of the miserable madness that
possessed him, and he kneeled beside the bed, sobbing
rendingly, and prayed. Her hand lay on his head, and after
a while, when the violence had passed by, he was taken with
a serene peace.

"He bade her good-night, tenderly.

"'Good-night,' she answered, 'and, John--I would that I
could give you half of what you would have given for me.'

"As he went out at the door he saw her face smiling at him,
with a great warmth of love and pity transfiguring it.

"'Nest morning, when the doctor came, he stayed near an
hour in her room, and then came to the Predikant.

"'Just tell me,' he said to him,--'just tell me straight and
short, what you did to your wife last night.'

"The Predikant told him in a few words what had passed
between them, while the doctor watched him and curled his
lip.

"'Exactly,' he said, when the Predikant had done. 'Quite
what I should have guarded against in you. Now you may go
to your wife as quickly as you like. She is dying!'

"It was so. She died in his arms in half an hour, with the
little smile of baffled motherhood yet on her lips."

Katje clenched her hands and looked out to the veld in
silence.

THE COWARD

"After all," said the Vrouw Grobelaar weightily, "a coward
is but one with keener eyes than his fellows. No young man
fears a ghost till it is dark, but the coward sees the
stars in the daytime, like a man at the bottom of a well,
and ghosts walk all about him.

"A coward should always be a married man," she added, "You
may say, Katje, that it is hard on the woman. It is what I
would expect of you. But when you have experience of
wifehood you will come to the knowledge that it is the
man's character which counts, and it is the woman's part to
make up his deficiencies. With what men learn by practicing
on their wives, the world has been made.

"If you would cease to cackle in that silly fashion I would
tell you of Andreas van Wyck, the coward--a tale that is
known to few. Well, then."

"He was a bushveld Boer, farming cattle on good land, not a
day's ride from the Tiger River. His wife, Anna