readiness of resource are
highly important official ingredients. Piet Plessis possessed both to a
consummate degree, which may have had to do with the fact that he was
now a very important official indeed.

Piet Plessis and Stephanus De la Rey were second cousins. It is
significant of the wide ramifications through which relationship extends
among the Dutch inhabitants of South Africa, that the high Transvaal
official and the well-to-do Cape Colony Boer should be so near akin.
They had hardly seen each other for some years, but intercourse between
them had been renewed in the shape of a cordial invitation to Aletta to
come up and spend some time in the Transvaal.

The girl was delighted. Her patriotic enthusiasm, though somewhat
sobered down of late, yielding to more personal and individual
considerations, was not dead by any means. To visit Pretoria under the
auspices of one who knew all the secrets of the Government, opened out
before her unbounded possibilities in the way of a vivid daily interest
at that critical period. She pictured herself in the confidence of her
kinsman, and he was in the confidence of the President. What would she
not hear!--what would she not know! But, as a preliminary, she little
knew her kinsman aforesaid.

But Piet while keeping his own secrets and those of the President to
himself, gave her a welcome that left nothing to be desired. So, too,
did his wife, a quiet woman, half-way through the thirties, rather
good-looking, but retiring and domesticated--not at all the sort of wife
for a public man, declared his acquaintance; wherein they were wrong,
for Mrs Plessis made all the better hostess, in that she cared nothing
for state affairs, desiring only to be left to look after her household
in peace and quietness. Piet, himself, moreover had good reason to
prefer her that way, inasmuch as he could seek the repose of his
domestic circle without being harried by all sorts of questions he had
no intention of answering.

He received the news of Aletta's engagement with a burst of genial
laughter, evoked less by reason of the fact itself than by the
particulars thereof.

"So, Aletta?" he said. "An Englishman! And that is the culmination of
all your exuberant patriotism, is it? An Englishman? Well, it might be
worse. You might have got taken by one of those _rooi-baatje_
officers--so many of you girls down at the Cape seem to go mad on them.
Bah, they are too often an impecuni