"'It will be the same thing during her lifetime. I have set down what the farm has brought me in for the past twenty years. She is to receive the average rental and to be its mistress. As I warned you before you married her, I will have no Englishman master here; but you may have the use of one-third of the income to be laid out in improvements. It is to be as a loan to you, and to be repaid from the extra profits of the place.' "I thought the arrangement, although curious, was very fair. I need hardly say that the income is now four times as great as it was when the old man died. The money I used for improvements has long since been paid off, and I have laid by a very considerable sum. My wife and I never talk about money matters. She has the amount that was annually made by her father, with which she runs the house, and spends as she likes. She neither asks what the farm now brings in, nor interferes with me in any way, so that we get on very well together. If she dies before me, I shall, in addition to what I have laid by, have a heavy mortgage on the farm; and between ourselves, it is morally certain that Dirck Jansen, if she leaves it to him, will never be able to pay the interest, for he will work on the old grooves, so far as he works at all, and in a couple of years after he takes possession I shall foreclose and have the farm put up to auction, in which case I hope that some Englishman will buy it. I should certainly not remain in the colony after her death. "These are the plans I had formed for myself, Yorke, and when I was in England, and invited you to come up, it was with a vague idea that some day you might possibly succeed me here. The mortgage which I shall hold over the property is larger than anyone would be likely to bid for the farm, and I thought that I might therefore purchase it in your name. But since you have been here, I have seen that this would not do. In the first place, you would never be contented to settle down here, you have too much energy to take to the life of a farmer; and this quarrel with Dirck would alone render that plan impossible. There is an enmity already established; and if he, after coming into possession of the farm, were turned out by you, he would become your deadly enemy, and would assuredly have the sympathy of his relations, and, indeed, of all the Boers around. Therefore I shall not particularly care who buys the farm and pays off my mortgage.