"And you think that I am going to stay here till then?"

"Well, where are you going?" asked her companion.

The girl crushed an ice-plant leaf between her fingers.

"Tant Sannie is a miserable old woman," she said. "Your father married
her when he was dying, because he thought she would take better care of
the farm, and of us, than an English woman. He said we should be taught
and sent to school. Now she saves every farthing for herself, buys us
not even one old book. She does not ill-use us--why? Because she is
afraid of your father's ghost. Only this morning she told her Hottentot
that she would have beaten you for breaking the plate, but that three
nights ago she heard a rustling and a grunting behind the pantry door,
and knew it was your father coming to spook her. She is a miserable old
woman," said the girl, throwing the leaf from her; "but I intend to go
to school."

"And if she won't let you?"

"I shall make her."

"How?"

The child took not the slightest notice of the last question, and folded
her small arms across her knees.

"But why do you want to go, Lyndall?"

"There is nothing helps in this world," said the child slowly, "but to
be very wise, and to know everything--to be clever."

"But I should not like to go to school!" persisted the small freckled
face.

"And you do not need to. When you are seventeen this Boer-woman will go;
you will have this farm and everything that is upon it for your own; but
I," said Lyndall, "will have nothing. I must learn."

"Oh, Lyndall! I will give you some of my sheep," said Em, with a sudden
burst of pitying generosity.

"I do not want your sheep," said the girl slowly; "I want things of my
own. When I am grown up," she added, the flush on her delicate features
deepening at every word, "there will be nothing that I do not know. I
shall be rich, very rich; and I shall wear not only for best, but every
day, a pure white silk, and little rose-buds, like the lady in Tant
Sannie's bedroom, and my petticoats will be embroidered, not only at the
bottom, but all through."

The lady in Tant Sannie's bedroom was a gorgeous creature from a
fashion-sheet, which the Boer-woman, somewhere obtaining, had pasted up
at the foot of her bed, to be profoundly admired by the children.

"It would be very nice," said Em; but it seemed a dream of quite too
transcendent a glory ever to be realized.

At this instant there appeared at the foot of the kopje two figures--the
on