r it was such a presentiment that made me say what I did the
last time you were here, and you reassured me on the subject of the
witch doctor at any rate. As to him, there is another strange
circumstance. Arlo, too, seems to have come under his influence. Arlo
who never could be got to take to any native, and now he is more
obedient to this Ukozi than to any of us; yet it is the obedience of
fear, for he whines and crouches when the witch doctor speaks to him.
Here, you will allow, is a real mystery.

"There are other things I might say, but I think I have said enough.
Again I hope you won't put me down as a weak-minded idiot frightened at
her own shadow. This country, you see, is so new and strange to us, and
our position is rather lonely; father, too, is ageing a good deal, so
there is some excuse if we feel a little--well, nervous, at times. As
it is I have put off writing to you until, as I reckon from what you
said, your time in Zululand must be nearly up, and then only that you
may not delay to come and see us immediately on your return.

"All send kind regards and are looking forward to welcoming you back,
but none more so than--

"Yours very sincerely,

"Aida Sewin.

"P.S.--I would rather you didn't mention anything of this to Falkner."

------------------------------------------------------------------------

This letter was, to say the least of it, puzzling. Carefully I read it
through again, and then it became obvious that the main drift of it was,
if not exactly an after-thought, at any rate not in the writer's mind to
communicate when she first began. Her contradictory accounts of her
father pointed to this. I made an effort to put behind me for the
present the feeling of exultation that I should be the one appealed to--
the rock of refuge, so to say--for I wanted to think out the drift of
the whole thing; and all my experience has gone to teach me that you
can't think, of two things at once without only half thinking of both of
them. The witch doctor's conduct was inexplicable viewed by the
ordinary light of common-sense motive. But I had lived long enough
among natives to know that I didn't really know them, which is
paradoxical yet true. I knew this much, that underlying their ordinary
and known customs there are others, to which no white man ever gains
access except by the purest accident--customs, it may be, to all
appearances utterly inconsequent or even ridiculous, but others again