“These Boer dances are very low things;” and then, as soon as it had gone from him, he thought it was not a clever remark, and wished it back.

Before Lyndall replied Em looked in at the door.

“Oh, come,” she said; “they are going to have the cushion-dance. I do not want to kiss any of these fellows. Take me quickly.”

She slipped her hand into Gregory’s arm.

“It is so dusty, Em; do you care to dance any more?” he asked, without rising.

“Oh, I do not mind the dust, and the dancing rests me.”

But he did not move.

“I feel tired; I do not think I shall dance again,” he said.

Em withdrew her hand, and a young farmer came to the door and bore her off.

“I have often imagined,” remarked Gregory — but Lyndall had risen.

“I am tired,” she said. “I wonder where Waldo is; he must take me home. These people will not leave off till morning, I suppose; it is three already.”

She made her way past the fiddlers, and a bench full of tired dancers, and passed out at the front door. On the “stoep” a group of men and boys were smoking, peeping in at the windows, and cracking coarse jokes. Waldo was certainly not among them, and she made her way to the carts and wagons drawn up at some distance from the homestead.

“Waldo,” she said, peering into a large cart, “is that you? I am so dazed with the tallow candles, I see nothing.”

He had made himself a place between the two seats. She climbed up and sat on the sloping floor in front.

“I thought I should find you here,” she said, drawing her skirt up about her shoulders. “You must take me home presently, but not now.”

She leaned her head on the seat near to his, and they listened in silence to the fitful twanging of the fiddles as the night-wind bore it from the farm-house, and to the ceaseless thud of the dancers, and the peals of gross laughter. She stretched out her little hand to feel for his.

“It is so nice to lie here and hear that noise,” she said. “I like to feel that strange life beating up against me. I like to realize forms of life utterly unlike mine.” She drew a long breath. “When my own life feels small, and I am oppressed with it, I like to crush together, and see it in a picture, in an instant, a multitude of disconnected unlike phases of human life — a mediæval monk with his string of beads pacing the quiet orchard, and looking up from the grass at his feet to the heavy fruit-trees; little Malay boys playing naked on a shining sea-beach; a Hindoo philosopher alone under his banyan-tree, thinking, thinking, thinking, so that in the thought of God he may lose himself; a troop of Bacchanalians dressed in white, with crowns of vine-leaves, dancing along the Roman streets; a martyr on the night of his death looking through the narrow window to the sky, and feeling that already he has the wings that shall bear him up” (she moved her hand dreamily over her face); “an epicurean discoursing at a Roman bath to a knot of his disciples on the nature of happiness; a Kaffir witch-doctor seeking for herbs by moonlight, while from the huts on the hill-side come the sound of dogs barking, and the voices of women and children; a mother giving bread and milk to her children in little wooden basins and singing the evening song. I like to see it all; I feel it run through me — that life belongs to me; it makes my little life larger, it breaks down the narrow walls that shut me in.”