ty
sufficient to blow up half the mountain, which was stowed away in a
cleft of an adjacent krantz, conveyed and deposited thither by authority
of no permit given under the hand of Nicholas Andrew Jelf, Resident
Magistrate.

Here was loyalty at last, anyhow! as that astute official had put it to
himself.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

SOLUTION.

How had it all come about? What was there in this girl that had seized
and held his mind--his every thought--ever since he had first set eyes
on her, all unexpectedly, that evening when he had come in, wet and
dripping, having barely escaped with his life? Colvin Kershaw, putting
the question to himself twenty times a day, could find no definite
answer to it.

No definite answer--no. Therein lay all the charm surrounding Aletta.
It was so indefinite. From the moment he had first beheld her the charm
had taken hold upon him. He had been unconsciously stirred by her
presence, her personality. Yet it was no case of love at first sight.
A strange, potent weaving of the spell had been on him then, and,
gradual in its development, had enchained him and now held him fast.

Day after day in his solitary dwelling he had recognised it, and
analysed it, and striven with its influence, yet had never attempted to
throw it off--had never shrunk instinctively from the weaving of its
coils around him. It was not born of solitude, as perhaps that other
coil, from which he would heartily fain be now entirely and
conscientiously free, had been. No matter under what circumstances, or
in what crowd they had met, he realised that the result would have been
the same; that the spell would still have been woven just the same.

He thought upon the conditions of life, and how such are apt to focus
themselves into a very small groove--the groove in which one happens,
for the time being, to run. Might it not be that the circumscribed area
into which life had resolved itself with him of late had affected his
judgment, and led him to take a magnified, a vital view of that which,
looked at from the outside world, would have struck him as a passing
fancy, and untenable save as such? Judgment, reason, heart, alike cried
out to the contrary, and cried aloud.

He might leave this remote habitation on the High Veldt, this region
outwardly so unattractive to the casual passer-through with a mind
absorbed by the state of the share market in Johannesburg or London, but
so enriveting to those who make it t