have a lower opinion of your insight into men than
I have been accustomed to harbour."

Her smile was not wholly without a touch of triumph.

"In that case," she went on, "I suppose the only alternative is for you
to remain here."

"That would appear to be logic," I replied. "But what can I do? Set up
in practice?"

"I don't see much opening," she answered. "If you ask my advice, I
should say there is only one thing to be done in Rhodesia just now--turn
farmer."

"It IS done," I answered, with my usual impetuosity. "Since YOU say the
word, I am a farmer already. I feel an interest in oats that is simply
absorbing. What steps ought I to take first in my present condition?"

She looked at me, all brown with the dust of my long ride. "I would
suggest," she said slowly, "a good wash, and some dinner."

"Hilda," I cried, surveying my boots, or what was visible of them,
"that is REALLY clever of you. A wash and some dinner! So practical, so
timely! The very thing! I will see to it."

Before night fell, I had arranged everything. I was to buy the next farm
from the owner of the one where Hilda lodged; I was also to learn
the rudiments of South African agriculture from him for a valuable
consideration; and I was to lodge in his house while my own was
building. He gave me his views on the cultivation of oats. He gave them
at some length--more length than perspicuity. I knew nothing about oats,
save that they were employed in the manufacture of porridge--which I
detest; but I was to be near Hilda once more, and I was prepared to
undertake the superintendence of the oat from its birth to its reaping
if only I might be allowed to live so close to Hilda.

The farmer and his wife were Boers, but they spoke English. Mr. Jan
Willem Klaas himself was a fine specimen of the breed--tall, erect,
broad-shouldered, and genial. Mrs. Klaas, his wife, was mainly
suggestive, in mind and person, of suet-pudding. There was one prattling
little girl of three years old, by name Sannie, a most engaging child;
and also a chubby baby.

"You are betrothed, of course?" Mrs. Klaas said to Hilda before me,
with the curious tactlessness of her race, when we made our first
arrangement.

Hilda's face flushed. "No; we are nothing to one another," she
answered--which was only true formally. "Dr. Cumberledge had a post at
the same hospital in London where I was a nurse; and he thought he would
like to try Rhodesia. That is all."

Mrs. Klaas gaze