s bones, as I was telling him just now. I must just go and take a
last look round."

"Did you do any more to my drawing to-day?" asked Hilary, as the two
stood within the sitting-room together, watching the efforts of a
yellow-faced Hottentot girl to make the logs blaze up.

"I've nearly finished it. I've only got to put in a touch or two."

"May I see it now?"

"No--not until it is finished. I may not be satisfied with it then, and
tear it up."

"But you are not to. I'm certain that however it turns out it will be
too good to treat in that way."

"Oh, Mr Blachland, I am surprised at such a speech from you," she said,
her eyes dancing with mischief. "Why, that's the sort of thing that
English boy might have said. But you! Oh!"

"Well, I mean it. You know I never hesitate to criticise and that
freely. Look at our standing fight over detail in foreground, as a
flagrant instance."

The drawing under discussion was a water-colour sketch of the house and
its immediate surroundings. He would treasure it as a reminder after he
had gone, he declared, when asking her to undertake it. To which she
had rejoined mischievously that he seemed in a great hurry to talk about
"after he had gone," considering that he had only just come.

Now the entrance of George Bayfield and his youngest born put an end to
the discussion, and soon they sat down to supper.

"Man, Mr Blachland, but that is a _mooi_ buck," began the boy. "Jafta
says he never saw a _mooi-er_ one."

"Perhaps it'll bring you luck," said Lyn, looking exceedingly reposeful
and sweet, behind the tea-things, in her twenty-year-old dignity at the
head of the table.

"I don't know," was the reply. "I did something once that was supposed
to bring frightful ill-luck, and for a long time it seemed as if it was
going to. But--indirectly it had just the opposite effect."

"Was that up-country, Mr Blachland?" chimed in the boy eagerly. "Do
tell us about it."

"Perhaps some day, Fred. But it's a thing that one had better have left
alone."

"These children'll give you no peace if you go on raising their
curiosity in that way," said Bayfield.

"I'll go up-country when I'm big," said the boy. "Are you going again,
Mr Blachland?"

"I don't know, Fred. You see, I've only just come down."

The boy said no more on the subject. He had an immense admiration for
their guest, who, when they were alone together, would tell him tales of
which he never wearie