he cried.
"Well, I will hear no more of your lies." And he forthwith
walked out of the house.

"Look at that!" said the Vrouw Grobelaar. "I never said a
word about his sweetheart."

COUNTING THE COLORS

THE horizon to the west was keen as the blade of a knife,
and over it all the colors swam and blended in an ecstasy
of sunset.

"There is more blood than peace in a sky like that,"
observed the Vrouw Grobelaar from her armchair on the
stoop. "When I was a child, I never saw a mess of fire in
the west but I thought it betokened the end of the world.
Ah, well, one grows wiser!"

"Green is for love," said Katje. "Do you see any green in
the sunset?" I saw a mile of it edging on a sea of orange
and a mountain of azure.

"Where?" demanded the old lady. "Oh, that--that's almost
blue, which means sin in marriage. But naming the colors in
the sky is a wasteful foolishness, and the folk that are
guided by them always tumble in the end. When Jan Uys was
on his death-bed, he said Dia had always been counting the
colors with the Irishman, and that's what caused all the
trouble."

Katje sighed.

"He was a man of sixty," the unconscious Vrouw continued,
"and a Boer of the best, with a farm below the Hangklip,
where my cousin Barend's aunt is now. He was a rich and
righteous man, too, and as upstanding and strong as any man
of his age that I ever saw. He had buried four good wives,
so nobody can say he wasn't a good husband, but he had a
way with him--something heavy and ugly, like a beast or a
Kafir--which many girls didn't like. His fifth wife was Dia,
who came from Lord knows where, somewhere down south, and
she was only sixteen.

"I believe in fitting a girl with a husband when she is
ripe, and sixteen is old enough with any well-grown maid.
But in the case of Dia, it is a pity somebody did not stop
to think. She was more than half a child; just a slender,
laughing, running thing that liked sweets and peaches
better than coffee and meat, and used to throw stones. She
threw one at my cart, with her arm low like a boy, and hit
my Kafir on the neck, and then squeaked and ran to hide
among the kraals. Yes, somebody should have stopped to
think before they coupled her to big Jan Uys, with his
scowl and his red eyes and white beard, and his sixty hard
years behind him."

"I should think so, indeed," was Katje's comment.

"What you think is of no importance," retorted the old lady
sharply. "I think so, and that s