e card even than Saduko, so I played another.

"And can I help you, Mameena, to tread a road that at the best must be
red with blood?"

"Why not," she asked, "since with or without you I am destined to tread
that road, the only difference being that with you it will lead to glory
and without you perhaps to the jackals and the vultures? Blood! Piff!
What is blood in Zululand?"

This card also having failed, I tabled my last.

"Glory or no glory, I do not wish to share it, Mameena. I will not
make war among a people who have entertained me hospitably, or plot the
downfall of their Great Ones. As you told me just now, I am nobody--just
one grain of sand upon a white shore--but I had rather be that than a
haunted rock which draws the heavens' lightnings and is drenched with
sacrifice. I seek no throne over white or black, Mameena, who walk my
own path to a quiet grave that shall perhaps not be without honour of
its own, though other than you seek. I will keep your counsel, Mameena,
but, because you are so beautiful and so wise, and because you say you
are fond of me--for which I thank you--I pray you put away these fearful
dreams of yours that in the end, whether they succeed or fail, will
send you shivering from the world to give account of them to the
Watcher-on-high."

"Not so, O Macumazana," she said, with a proud little laugh. "When your
Watcher sowed my seed--if thus he did--he sowed the dreams that are
a part of me also, and I shall only bring him back his own, with the
flower and the fruit by way of interest. But that is finished. You
refuse the greatness. Now, tell me, if I sink those dreams in a great
water, tying about them the stone of forgetfulness and saying: 'Sleep
there, O dreams; it is not your hour'--if I do this, and stand before
you just a woman who loves and who swears by the spirits of her fathers
never to think or do that which has not your blessing--will you love me
a little, Macumazahn?"

Now I was silent, for she had driven me to the last ditch, and I knew
not what to say. Moreover, I will confess my weakness--I was strangely
moved. This beautiful girl with the "fire in her heart," this woman who
was different from all other women that I had ever known, seemed to have
twisted her slender fingers into my heart-strings and to be drawing
me towards her. It was a great temptation, and I bethought me of old
Zikali's saying in the Black Kloof, and seemed to hear his giant laugh.

She glided up to