“Almighty! do you suppose that I sit here to answer riddles?” replied Jan, pulling at his great beard. “Why do I call you son, indeed? Ah!” he added in a different voice, a sorrowful voice, “why do I when I have no right? Listen, my boy, we are in sore trouble, I and your mother, or if she is not your mother at least she loves you as much as though she were, and I love you too, and you know it; so why do you seek to make a fool of me by asking me riddles?” Now, Ralph was about to answer, but Suzanne held up her hand, and he was quiet. “My son,” went on Jan with a kind of sob, “they are coming to take you away from us.” “They! Who?” asked Ralph. “Who? The English, damn them! Yes, I say, damn the English and the English Government.” “Peace, Jan,” I broke in, “this is not a political meeting, where such talk is right and proper.” “The English Government is coming to take me away!” exclaimed Ralph bewildered. “What has the Government to do with me?” “No,” said Jan, “not the English Government, but two Scotchmen, which is much the same thing. I tell you that they are travelling to this place to take you away.” Now, Ralph leaned back in his chair and stared at him, for he saw that it was little use to ask him questions, and that he must leave him to tell the tale in his own fashion. At last it came out. “Ralph,” said my husband, “you know that you are not of our blood; we found you cast up on the beach like a storm-fish and took you in, and you grew dear to us; yes, although you are English or Scotch, which is worse, for if the English bully us the Scotch bully us and cheat us into the bargain. Well, your parents were drowned, and have been in Heaven for a long time, but I am sorry to say that all your relations were not drowned with them. At first, however, they took no trouble to hunt for you when we should have been glad enough to give you up.” “No,” broke in Suzanne and I with one voice, and I added, “How do you dare to tell such lies in the face of the Lord, Jan?” “——When it would not have been so bad to give you up,” he went on, correcting himself. “But now it seems that had you lived you would have inherited estates, or titles, or both.” “Is the boy dead then?” I asked. “Be silent, wife, I mean—had he lived a Scotchman. Therefore, having made inquiries, and learned that a lad of your name and age had been rescued from a shipwreck and was still alive among the Boers in the Transkei, they have set to work to hunt you, and are coming here to take you away, for I tell you that I heard it in the dorp yonder.” “Is it so?” said Ralph, while Suzanne hung upon his words with white face and trembling lips. “Then I tell you that I will not go. I may be English, but my home is here. My own father and mother are dead, and these strangers are nothing to me, nor are the estates and titles far away anything to me. All that I hold dear on the earth is here in the Transkei,” and he glanced at Suzanne, who seemed to bless him with her eyes.