‘Can’t be seen from the waggon here,’ he said to himself; ‘not that it matters much, though--their manners are disgusting, and assuredly morals they have none. Covering my trail is much the same as going to church in the old country for the benefit of the servants,’ he added with a laugh. The light from the risen moon was fairly strong, and the track, luckily free from meer-cat holes, lay straight over the _veldt_ towards a large broken group of sandy red rocks of curious formation. Their irregular outlines took weird and mysterious shapes in the half light, and their happening in the vast flat desolation of the _Karroo_ gave them the appearance of being the creation of some saturninely fantastic spirit. The track ran so narrowly between two of the biggest rocks that a driver could touch them on either side of him with his whip. Out of the red soil of the rock on the one side grew a giant Cokerbôm tree, old as the world itself, projected in a stiff uncompromising rigidity over the track. The Englishman, riding rapidly beneath, reached up and plucked a spiky, inhospitable leaf. ‘Tough old beggar!’ he soliloquised, sucking his finger, ‘you’ll be growing here when _I’m_ dead and gone, and all’s blue; in a couple of thousand years you _may_ be a foot or so taller if you have luck; rum things, trees--wonder if they have souls?’ He emerged into the open _veldt_ again, and another half hour’s canter brought him within sight of an isolated piece of civilisation; the lengthy, low, white buildings of an outlying Boer ostrich-farm, in a square enclosure, dotted with carefully fostered and unwilling plane and eucalyptus trees. ‘Steady!’ he muttered, ‘she said last night she’d be at this end--yes, and that’s the tree. He reined in his horse. ‘There she is, by heaven! What a blessing to find a woman punctual; but then she isn’t a woman, only a girl--poor child!’ With a half sigh he swung himself from the saddle, and, leading his horse, stepped forward to where, shrinking in the shadow of a couple of trees just on the outside of the enclosure, stood a slip of a girl in a white dress with a dark cloak thrown over it. Her grey eyes lost their look of fright, and devoured him, as he fastened his horse to a branch; with a low cry, almost a moan, of delight, she straightened herself and sprang into his arms. ‘How long have you been here, _Liebchen mein?_’ He spoke in Africander, with an occasional German word. ‘O my King, I came as soon as the house was quiet and I could steal out. I came like a mouse, with my heart in my mouth, and two hours I have waited and suffered, but now--now--O my Lord and King, I live, and the darkness is overpast--see, I have brought all that I have, as thou badest me.’ She lifted a slight bundle wrapped in a light rug, and placed her other hand timidly, with oh! so light a touch, upon his beard. ‘Is my Lord’ (she used a word that in Africander means also husband) ‘pleased with his servant?’