d from one to other of us suspiciously. "You English are
strange!" she answered, with a complacent little shrug. "But there--from
Europe! Your ways, we know, are different."

Hilda did not attempt to explain. It would have been impossible to make
the good soul understand. Her horizon was so simple. She was a harmless
housewife, given mostly to dyspepsia and the care of her little ones.
Hilda had won her heart by unfeigned admiration for the chubby baby. To
a mother, that covers a multitude of eccentricities, such as one expects
to find in incomprehensible English. Mrs. Klaas put up with me because
she liked Hilda.

We spent some months together on Klaas's farm. It was a dreary place,
save for Hilda. The bare daub-and-wattle walls; the clumps of misshapen
and dusty prickly-pears that girt round the thatched huts of the Kaffir
workpeople; the stone-penned sheep-kraals, and the corrugated iron roof
of the bald stable for the waggon oxen--all was as crude and ugly as a
new country can make things. It seemed to me a desecration that Hilda
should live in such an unfinished land--Hilda, whom I imagined as moving
by nature through broad English parks, with Elizabethan cottages and
immemorial oaks--Hilda, whose proper atmosphere seemed to be one of
coffee-coloured laces, ivy-clad abbeys, lichen-incrusted walls--all that
is beautiful and gracious in time-honoured civilisations.

Nevertheless, we lived on there in a meaningless sort of way--I hardly
knew why. To me it was a puzzle. When I asked Hilda, she shook her head
with her sibylline air and answered, confidently: "You do not understand
Sebastian as well as I do. We have to wait for HIM. The next move is
his. Till he plays his piece, I cannot tell how I may have to checkmate
him."

So we waited for Sebastian to advance a pawn. Meanwhile, I toyed with
South African farming--not very successfully, I must admit. Nature did
not design me for growing oats. I am no judge of oxen, and my views on
the feeding of Kaffir sheep raised broad smiles on the black faces of my
Mashona labourers.

I still lodged at Tant Mettie's, as everybody called Mrs. Klaas; she was
courtesy aunt to the community at large, while Oom Jan Willem was its
courtesy uncle. They were simple, homely folk, who lived up to their
religious principles on an unvaried diet of stewed ox-beef and bread;
they suffered much from chronic dyspepsia, due in part, at least, no
doubt, to the monotony of their food, their li