umbled him, loosely like a dead
man, among the rows of bricks about him. I did not see the
Kafir run away; I saw only the thin white face of my man
turned up to the sun, and the blood that ran from his brown
hair. I lifted his head and called to him; but his head
lolled on his shoulders, and I let him lie while I ran out
crying to find help.

"It was some of the yellow folk who carried him in for me,
and brought the German doctor.

"Kornel was on the bed when he came, and he caused the cut
to be bandaged, and then spoke abstrusely of the effect of
the blow, so that I understood nothing at all. I learned,
however, how I was to tend him, how feed him, and how he
would lie unconscious for long intervals when there would
be nothing at all to do for him. But he told me I had
nothing to fear in the end. Indeed, he had a kind of
cheeriness which seems to belong to doctors, which did much
to comfort me and steady me for what was to come. Kornel
would not die, he said; and it was that assurance I chiefly
needed.

"The day went slowly for me, I can tell you. There was yet
food enough in the house to last us a little while, and I
made a mess for Kornel, and ate what I wanted myself. He
recovered his sense of things once or twice, but when night
came he dropped off again into a stupor from which he was
not to be roused, and it was then I left him. I felt as
though I were a traitor to him in his weakness; but my mind
had buzzed hopelessly all day about the problem of our mere
living, and I saw nothing else for it, so down I went to
the spruit to earn what I might for my sick husband.

"The moon gave me light, and I had watched Kornel often
enough to know how to go about the work. But the water, as
it flowed about my legs, bit me with a chill that made me
gasp, and the effort of the work, the constant bending and
lifting, tried every muscle in my body. I had seen the
cruelty of the work in its traces on Kornel, and knew how
little it gave and how much it took; but with this first
trial of it came the realization, never lost since, of how
gallant a man I had chosen to stand between me and the
world, and how much I owed him. I had not time to think a
great deal, for the torture of brick-making is partly in
the tact that while it wrenches the body, it joins the mind
to its infinite triviality. If you think, you do not pack
the mud as it must be packed, and the sun crumbles your
bricks to dust. It is no task for a real man at