"No, you haven't," she assented with the shadow of a smile. "So let me go my own way with a good grace. Besides, with old Josane to look after me, I can't come to much harm." She had telegraphed to her late husband's manager at Swaanepoel's Hoek, requesting him to send the old cattle-herd to her at once. Three days later Josane arrived, and having commissioned Hoste to buy her a few cows and some slaughter sheep, enough to supply her modest household. Eanswyth had carried out her somewhat eccentric plan. The utter loneliness of the place--the entire absence of life--the empty kraals and the silent homestead, all this is inexpressibly grateful to her crushed and lacerated spirit. And in the dead silence of those uninhabited rooms she conjures up the sweetest, the holiest memories. Her solitude, her complete isolation, conveys no terror--no spark of misgiving, for it is there that her very life has been lived. The dead stillness of the midnight hour, the ghostly creaking of a board, the hundred and one varying sounds begotten of silence and darkness, inspire her with no alarm, for her imagination peoples these empty and deserted rooms with life once more. She can see him as she saw him in life, moving about the place on different errands bent. There is his favourite chair; there his place at the table. His personality seems still to pervade the whole house, his spirit to hover around her, to permeate her whole being, here as it could nowhere else. But it was on first entering his room, which still contained a few possessions too cumbersome or too worthless to carry away--a trunk or two and a few old clothes--here it was that that awful and vivid contrast struck her in overwhelming force. What an expression there is in such poor and useless relics--a glove, a boot, a hat, even an old pipe--when we know we shall never see the owner again, parted perhaps by circumstances, by distance, by death. Do not such things seem verily to speak--and to speak eloquently--to bring before our eyes, to sound within our ears, the vision, the voice of one whom we shall never behold again? Ah! do they not! Standing for the first time alone in that room, Eanswyth felt as though her heart had been broken afresh. She fell prone among those poor and worthless relics, pressing them passionately to her lips, while her tears fell like rain. If ever her lover's spirit could come back to her, surely it would be in that room. "O Eustace, my darling, my first and only love!" murmured the stricken creature, lying face to the very floor in the agony of her grief. "Come to me from the shadowy spirit land! O God, send him to me, that I may look upon him once more!" The shadows deepened within the room. Raising her head she gazed around, and the expression of pitiable eagerness on the white drawn face was fearful to behold.