l, there was a rolling vacancy, a wildness, in her eye,
that made me fear at once for her reason. Under one arm she clasped
tightly a big Bible, and never in the subsequent days that we were
together did she once relinquish it. It seemed that some terrible
calamity had overturned her reason.

"`Whence come ye, George Kenstone?' (she had known me well for years),
she cried in a harsh, high-pitched scream, very painful to listen to.
`Take me out of this desert, and back to my home. I have been cast away
these six weeks able to move neither hand nor foot for freedom. The man
I called husband is dead, and my servants have fled, and the oxen are
gone--the Lord knows where.'

"I scarce knew how to begin with her.

"`I'm sorry, Tant' Starreberg,' I said, `to find you in this plight.
I'm afraid there has been sad mischief, and your husband has been shot.
Is it not so? We will help you gladly, of course, and early in the
morning, when the oxen will be rested, we will take you out of this
place. I fear you have suffered much. But how came poor Dirk by his
end? Was it the boys?'

"At the mention of Dirk her whole expression changed; her eyes filled
with a terrible light. In her best days Vrouw Starreberg was a
hard-featured, ugly woman. Now she looked almost fiendish.

"`_Poor_ Dirk?' she shrieked with a horrible scorn. `_Poor_ Dirk? No,
I am not afraid to own it! The man you call Dirk Starreberg--he was no
more husband of mine--died by my hand. I shot him; yes, dead I shot
him, as he sat by his fire. And why? Because he lied and was
unfaithful. Because he forsook me for that mop-headed, blue-eyed,
pink-faced doll--Alletta Veeland. And when at last I had discovered
all--he talked over-much in his sleep, the traitor!--and taxed him with
it, here in this very veldt, he laughed me to scorn, and told me he was
tired of my black face and my sour ways, and gloried in his evil love.
Ja! he taunted me that I was old and barren--I that had made a man of
him, and brought him gold, and flocks, and herds, and set him up. And
so I shot him, as I say. I could endure it no longer; and the servants,
having trekked to this place with me, fled, and the oxen wandered, and I
am alone, the Lord help me!' At the next instant the poor, overwrought
creature fell in a swoon upon the sand.

"Well, it was all very horrible; although even now we hardly knew what
to believe. But we brought her to, gave her some brandy, and put her