Matheson made no immediate answer. Macfarlane's speech somehow visualised for him the whitewashed walls of Benfontein, and Honor's face showing wanly in the moonlight while the low-pitched voice breathed its earnest question: "I wonder if you will ever see into the heart of the veld?" "I can't tell what I'll do," he answered after a long silence, and got up and went away with rather surprising suddenness. July ended and August came in on the pathetic note of Belgium's appeal against the savage bestiality of this new-born oppression which overran her territory, an appeal to which there could be but one answer. The hour for Great Britain's intervention struck with that piteous cry for help. To Matheson, after the first shock of amaze wore off, it did not appear so much a question of a European crisis as of the deepening of that sinister shadow which stretched its forbidding length across this land. Dark though the cloud of war loomed in Europe, this lesser cloud, which lay like a black stain upon the sunlit peacefulness, was even more tragic in the bitter personal nature of its animus. If no human agency could disperse this cloud, brother would be against brother, friend against friend. Matheson did not believe that anything would avert the disaster. Quite clearly he saw it coming. Every word in Holman's letter was indelibly fixed in his memory--the letter which Honor had read to him, and which breathed through every line the insidious cunning of the spy who is paid to organise rebellion. It was coming surely, and it would come soon. The first intimation of active trouble revealed itself in the impudent invasion of the Union by a German force from South-West Africa, an act of war that could have originated only in a confident assurance of a prompt and general rising of the Boers. Matheson applied to his firm for leave to volunteer, and received immediate permission. He was in a state of considerable indecision. His interest in the country inclined him to stay to defend it. Had it been a matter simply of fighting the Germans there would have been no hesitation in respect of choice; but he felt an increasing reluctance to take the field against Honor's people. They were wrong, they were wholly mistaken; but at bottom, the motives which actuated the majority of them were pure in conception. If later in the heat of conflict, and with a free rein given to hatred, some among them lowered their ideals and committed base acts, these were in the minority. He knew what they would fight for--Liberty. Man has sought after and fought for his ideal of liberty since the beginning of time.