ead bowed and looked no one in the
face. He had a farm under the Hangklip, and a very nice
farm it was, with two wells and a big dam right up above
the lands, so that he had no need for a windmill to carry
his water. If he had stuck to the farm Stoffel might have
been a rich man; and perhaps, when he was old enough to be
listened to, the Burghers might have made him a feldkornet.

"But no! He must needs cast his eyes about him till they
fell on one Katrina Ruiter, the daughter, so please you, of
a dirty takhaar bijwohner on his own farm. He went mad
about the girl, and thought her quite different from all
other girls, though she had a troop of untidy sisters like
herself galloping wild about the place. I will own she was
a well-grown slip of a lass, tall and straight, and all
that; but she had a winding, bending way with her that
struck me like something shameless. For the rest, she had a
lot of coal-black hair that bunched round her face like the
frame round a picture; but there was something in the color
of her skin and the shaping of her lips and nostrils, that
made me say to myself, 'Ah, somewhere and somewhen your
people have been meddling with the Kafirs.'

"Black? No, of course she wasn't black. Nor yet yellow; but
I tell you, the black blood showed through her white skin
so clearly that I wonder Stoffel Mostert did not see it and
drive her from his door with a sjambok.

"But the man was clean mad, and, spite of all we could do,--
spite of his uncle, the Predikant; spite of the ugly dirty
family of the girl herself,--he rode her to the dorp and
married her there; for the Predikant, godly man, would not
turn a hand in the business.

"Now, just how they lived together I cannot tell you for
sure; for you may be very certain I drank no coffee in the
house of the bijwohner's daughter. But, by all hearings,
they bore with one another very well; and I have even been
told that Stoffel was much given to caressing the woman,
and she would make out to love him very much indeed.

"Perhaps she really did? What nonsense! How can a
bijwohner's baggage love a well-to-do Burgher? You are
talking foolishness. But anyhow, if there was any trouble
between them, they kept it to themselves for close upon a
year.

"Then (this is how it has been told to me) one night
Stoffel woke up in the dark, and his wife was not beside
him.

"'Is it morning already?' he said, and looked through the
window. But the stars were high an