s the high veldt oxen just before spring. Our arms were again
victorious; the redcoats ran away and left their ambulance in our hands,
carrying with them many dead and wounded. Among the dead was the Captain
Niel----"

Here Bessie uttered a sort of choking cry, and let the letter fall
over the verandah, to one of the posts of which she clung with both her
hands.

The ill-favoured native below grinned, and, picking the paper up, handed
it to her.

She took it, feeling that she must know all, and read on like one reads
in some ghastly dream:

"who has been staying on your uncle's farm. I did not see him killed
myself, but Jan Vanzyl shot him, and Roi Dirk Oosthuizen, and Carolus, a
Hottentot, saw them pick him up and carry him away. They say that he was
quite dead. For this I fear you will be sorry, as I am, but it is
the chance of war, and he died fighting bravely. Make my obedient
compliments to your uncle. We parted in anger, but I hope in the new
circumstances that have arisen in the land to show him that I, for one,
bear no anger.--Believe me, dear Miss Bessie, your humble and devoted
servant,

"Frank Muller."

Bessie thrust the letter into the pocket of her dress, then again she
caught hold of the verandah post, and supported herself by it, while the
light of the sun appeared to fade visibly out of the day before her eyes
and to replace itself by a cold blackness in which there was no break.
He was dead!--her lover was dead! The glow had gone from her life as it
seemed to be going from the day, and she was left desolate. She had
no knowledge of how long she stood thus, staring with wide eyes at the
sunshine she could not see. She had lost her count of time; things were
phantasmagorical and unreal; all that she could realise was this one
overpowering, crushing fact--John was dead!

"Missie," said the ill-favoured messenger below, fixing his one eye upon
her poor sorrow-stricken face, and yawning.

There was no answer.

"Missie," he said again, "is there any answer? I must be going. I want
to get back in time to see the Boers take Pretoria."

Bessie looked at him vaguely. "Yours is a message that needs no answer,"
she said. "What is, is."

The brute laughed. "No, I can't take a letter to the Captain," he said;
"I saw Jan Vanzyl shoot him. He fell _so_," and suddenly he collapsed
all in a heap on the path, in imitation of a man struck dead by a
bullet. "I can't take _him_ a message, missie," he went