dwelling on painful subjects very often, I
notice. 'Don't you think that they are like?' I asked.

'Kaffir children favor one another,' Dick said sagely. He stood
watching the picture on the faded wall in silence. Then we
dropped the subject. But the mystery of it remained for me.

A week or two after, that mystery multiplied. Dick was expecting
visitors, and he asked me over to meet them. The male visitor was
an official I used to know of old; he was to bring his sister
with him this time, and the sister I did not know. She was a
charming person; one who had been in the country a long time ago
and left it, but had come back again now to be married and to
make a home in Rosebery. She had reached the homestead about
mid-day, the same day that I came over in the late afternoon.

After tea and before dinner we walked down to the cattle-kraal,
all four of us. Then, when Dick and her brother were ahead she
began to question me about that water-color on the wall. I told
her what Dick had told me. 'He told me that himself,' she said,
'but I didn't understand.'

'I thought I knew two of the children,' I said, 'but Kaffir
children seem much alike to our English eyes, don't they? They
seemed to me to resemble two quite little children I used to come
and see. They were badly burnt near here.'

She started.

'Did they get better?' she asked. I shook my head. She started
again. 'Listen,' she said. 'Two children to whom I used to be
nursery-governess were murdered in the "Rebellion" on a farm
close to this very place. They were staying with their mother's
elder sister. Please do try and tell me this. Why are these
portraits, life-like portraits, of those two children in this
picture?'

I stared at her rather stupidly. Then Dick came to us we, were
close up to the cattle-kraal and called us to come and see his
young stock, and talked to us about them.

'I don't think I'll tell the children's mother,' she said to me.
I was then saying good-night to her in the bright moonlight
outside the homestead door some hours afterwards. 'They live in
the colony now, she and her husband. Telling her might reopen
deep wounds. It wouldn't do any good at all probably, would it?'

'That depends,' I said, 'on the mother's point of view. You're
sure about the likeness?' She gave a sort of sob.

'Trust me for that,' she said. 'I was very fond of them of Claude
and Polly.'

This last dry season, by the ordering of God, that mother came
our