As for the lads, theirs was a bewilderment that stilled their judgment. Klein Piet, the eldest, leaned on his rifle and stared out at the sea with empty eyes, for it spoke to unguessed depths in his soul; and Jan and Andries were both a little afraid. They had nothing to say, and when presently Piet led the way back to the wagons, they followed him hesitating, casting nervous glances over their shoulders as they went. Even by the fires, as they sat together over their evening meal, some constraint remained with them, so that they talked with an effort of trivial things while their thoughts abode elsewhere, and Susanna looked from one to another with a little frown of perplexity. Not one of them could have told what troubled him, or guessed that in his very name of Van Praagh there closed a long tradition of the salt and sound of the sea. It was when a new dawn had shown them the place in clear light, unwitched by evening shadows and calm, that Piet made his decision. Landward of the sand the veld was rich, with patches of bush; a stream ran through it handily, and to his eyes, wise in a hundred aspects of game land, cattle land, and mealie land, it spoke of security and comfort. He was not a man to be drawn from his sure judgment by trifles of liking and curiosity; he had lived too close to the real things of life to be deluded by semblances; but none the less, there was gladness for him that all these good things, the materials of a home and a livelihood, lay at the flank of that great tame sea, to whose noise his ears were already become accustomed. There was a welcome in the sound of it; under the morning sun it showed a face as bright as a host's; and when the lads came back from the beach, with their hair blown about their faces and their hands full of shells, they found him sitting on an ant hill, in the middle of a square he had marked out with big smooth stones. "What is it?" asked Klein Piet. "Our house," answered his father. "We will build it here, with the stoop looking out to the water. That--" he pointed a line with his finger--"that shall be the front of it, to face the sun each day when he up-saddles. There, yonder, shall be the kraals; and we will live between the sea and the veld and have the best of both. What do you think of it?" Andries laughed delightedly; a new thing was always a good thing for him. Jan, too, was pleased and curious; only Klein Piet looked grave, but not with any doubt or dissatisfaction. "Well?" asked the father again. "What do you think of it, my son?" Klein Piet answered slowly. "I think well of it," he said, meeting his father's gaze with his steady blue eyes; "so well, father, that I should have stayed in any case, even if you had turned back." "Eh?" The elder man doubted if he heard aright. Klein Piet seemed to be in a dream. "I only know," he said, in the same slow manner of speech, "that this place I stand on is like a birth-place to me. I must have dreamed of it when I was a child."