The horses took a fresh spurt when the level road was reached and trotted briskly towards the hotel and drew up in style before the entrance. Esme surveyed the low rambling building with interested eyes. It was a quaint old-fashioned place, this hotel on the veld, one-storied, with a stoep in front and a flight of low steps leading up to it. The garden gate stood open, and a man, who was possibly the proprietor Esme decided, waited at the gate to receive the arrivals. A coloured boy came out to help with the luggage. Esme alighted and walked up the garden path, conscious of the curious gaze of a little knot of people gathered on the stoep to participate in the great excitement of the day,--the arrival of the cart with its load of passengers. The hotel was fairly full; there were men and women on the stoep and several children. The girl was too shy to note any of these people particularly; she took them in collectively at a glance and passed on and went inside. A woman stepped forward out of the gloom of the narrow passage, took her name and conducted her to her room. Left alone in her room, Esme crossed to the open window and stood looking out upon the wild bit of garden with its kei-apple hedge and the small vley quite close to the window. The glint of the water in the sunshine was pleasing to watch. That the water would breed mosquitoes, and other things likely to disturb one's repose at night, did not trouble her; she liked to see it. It stretched cool and clear as a mirror reflecting the blue of the unclouded sky. The scene from the window was peaceful and pleasing. The whole place was peaceful: an atmosphere of drowsy detachment hung over everything. One felt out of the world here, and at the same time intensely alive. A sense of well-being and of contentment came to the girl while she knelt before the window with her arms on the low sill, looking out upon the unfamiliar scene. She had come to this isolated spot in search of health; and already she felt invigorated by the fresh pure air; her mind worked more clearly, threw off its morbid lethargy in newly kindled interest in everything about her. The clean homelike simplicity of her little bedroom pleased her; the view from the window pleased her; it was expansive, uncultivated--a vast stretch of veld, green and brown in the glow of the declining day, with the azure sky overhead remotely blue as a sapphire is blue, a jewel lit with the yellow flame of the sun. Book 1--CHAPTER TWO. The dining-room at the hotel was a low, narrow room, rather dark. Its French windows opened on to the stoep, which was creeper veiled and shaded with the shrubs in the garden. Down the centre of the room was a long table. A smaller room led off from the principal dining-room, where the guests with families took their meals.