Her eyes, looking out from the shade of her helmet, dwelt with intense appreciation upon the shimmering landscape. All the wonder and the beauty and the richness of the plain, which appeared now but a blackened waste, was known to her. To the unobservant gaze the scene might wear the semblance of an arid desert; but to one familiar with it through the different seasons the drought-stricken sterility which held the veld in a relentless, strangling grip was but the period of waiting when the land rested in expectation of the coming gift of life. With the rains the richness concealed in her dry bosom would spring forth and blossom prodigally, and the desert would be a garden, teeming with life. "Love of the land!" she repeated softly. And added, after a moment: "Have you ever breathed air so good as this?--so light and clear and dry? There's health in every breath of it. One could see to the ends of the earth through air so pure and clear. There is health here, and freedom." "It is a savage land," he said suddenly--"but it grips. It is the savagery which gets hold of one. I feel I want to tame it." She laughed, and pointed upward where a vulture with great wings outspread flew heavily in the blue, sensing its prey. "Could you tame the aasvogel," she asked, "till it ceases to be a carrion bird and eats from your hand? Could you teach the jackal to respect the lamb?--or the snake to forget its venom? I would hate to see this land subdued." He smiled at her enthusiasm. There was something in herself which, if not exactly savage, was at least untamed, he reflected. Without thinking she had quickened her horse's pace. Matheson rode faster to keep up with her. "I have disappointed you," he said. "Oh, no!" she contradicted quickly. "It wasn't to be expected that you would feel as we do about the veld... But you see deeper than many Englishmen. You will love the land yet." He made no answer to this. Had he put his thoughts into words, they would have claimed to love the land already. It was amazing how surely and firmly it had got a hold on his imagination. It was not only with his arrival at the farm, he told himself, that he had felt this extraordinary influence; but since he had come to Benfontein he had acquired a new sympathy with, and a deeper understanding of, the country. Honor Krige was teaching him that, and other things.