How could this man have learned his history? Noakes could not have betrayed him. For the honour of his dead comrade he could not let the matter drop. Wilson tilted back his chair and squirted a stream of tobacco-juice over the floor, which aroused the indignation of the Boer woman, who was sitting on some sacks near the door, peeling potatoes. Her lord was a beastly Englander, and a great many other undesirable things. Wilson, who had not yet laced his heavy boots, took one off to throw at her head, but Joyce caught his arm. “What a brute you are!” he said angrily. Wilson broke into a laugh. “You’d better thank Mr. Joyce for saving your beauty from being damaged,” he said, pulling on the boot again. “Now,” said Joyce, as soon as domestic peace was restored, “tell me what you meant just now.” Wilson rose, went to the door and ostentatiously spat over the Boer woman’s head; then he turned round to Joyce:-- “Look here,” he said, “I have my hands full enough of quarrelling as it is. You ’d better trek off with that waggon and a couple of niggers. And I ’ll give you a piece of advice. When next you shake down alongside of a man to sleep, just keep from blabbing all your private affairs to him. And that’s why I wanted to be shut of you. We can do without your kind hereabouts. No wonder you were surprised to find me honest.” “I suppose I must beg your pardon,” said Joyce humiliated. “I had no right to speak to you as I did.” “If you had held your tongue, I should have held mine, as I have done for the last year and a half,” replied Wilson. A few hours later Joyce stood up in the ox-waggon and looked back at the detested place that had so long been his home. It was just a speck in the midst of the cheerless plain under the irregular mound, the _kopje_, behind which poor Noakes lay buried. He drew an envelope from his pocket and looked at the blade of grass he had picked from the grave. Ashamed of his sentimentality, he twirled it between his fingers, undecided whether to throw it away or not. He ended by replacing it in his pocket. After all, it symbolised a pure, tender feeling, and he was not carrying away with him too many. He smoked in silence through the night, under the clear stars. He was sore at heart, deeply humiliated. The buoyancy of new hopes which his little literary success had occasioned during the last few weeks, had gone. The sense of the ineffaceable stain overpowered him. It was a fatality. Go where he would, he could not hide it from the knowledge of men. In his own land, accusing fingers pointed to it at street corners. In the uttermost ends of the earth he himself proclaimed it aloud.