The three women at Harmony now turned their thoughts into another channel. The mother being far from well herself, arrangements had to be made to leave her in the companionship of some suitable and congenial woman, until her "boys" came home--one from the front, if he were still alive, the other from captivity. A girl friend offered to take Hansie's place at Harmony and promised not to leave Mrs. van Warmelo until the country was in a settled state again. This was Hansie's only crumb of consolation during those last days at home. Many difficulties were made about her permits when she applied for leave to go to Holland, and many were the questions asked, her interview with General Maxwell being the least unsatisfactory when she told him of her approaching marriage. "You may go with pleasure," he had said; but a few days afterwards Hansie received a letter from the Provost-Marshal, saying that "the present regulations do not allow burghers or their families to leave South Africa." Hansie wrote to Lord Kitchener, but received no reply, and it was nearly the middle of May, after some weeks of uncertainty, harder far to bear than trouble of a more decided character, when she and Mrs. Cloete left the capital for Cape Colony. Hansie's last words in her diary are: "There is quite a history connected with the procuring of my permits, which I shall relate another time. _I am too tired now._" Words significant of what the girl had endured in parting from her mother and leaving her beloved country at a time so critical! * * * * * On an ocean-steamer she found herself at last--alone, for in that crowd there was no face familiar to her to be seen. She mixed freely with the crowd; she sought, in the games with which these voyages usually are passed, to forget--to forget; but the nights of sleeplessness remained--her waking terror, with which she was consumed. Two men there were who proved sympathetic, one a Scotchman, the other an Englishman--both anti-Boer and sadly misinformed when first she met them, both "converts" by the time they reached their native shores. Sitting at table she listened intently to the conversations on the war--the war, the never-ending war. On no occasion did she breathe a word of what _she_ knew, of what _she_ felt, until one day at dinner a young English lieutenant, "covered with glory" and returning home a hero of the war, enlarged on the services rendered by one brave officer, well known by name to Hansie. "It is not only what he achieved with so much success in the field," he continued. "I am thinking now of those two years he spent in the Pretoria Forts _before_ the war, as a common labourer, doing menial work with other men, and secretly making plans and drawing charts of the Pretoria fortifications. Every detail was made known to our military before we went to war." Exclamations of surprise, a murmur of admiration, ran along the table.