“Am I, am I Gregory Nazianzen Rose?” he said.

It was all so strange, he sitting there in that “sloot” in that up-country plain! — strange as the fantastic, changing shapes in a summer cloud. At last, tired out, he fell asleep, with his head against the bank. When he woke the shadow had stretched across the “sloot,” and the sun was on the edge of the plain. Now he must be up and doing. He drew from his breast pocket a little six-penny looking-glass, and hung it on one of the roots that stuck out from the bank. Then he dressed himself in one of the old-fashioned gowns and a great pinked-out collar. Then he took out a razor. Tuft by tuft the soft brown beard fell down into the sand, and the little ants took it to line their nests with. Then the glass showed a face surrounded by a frilled cap, white as a woman’s, with a little mouth, a very short upper lip, and a receding chin.

Presently a rather tall woman’s figure was making its way across the “veld.” As it passed a hollowed-out ant-heap it knelt down, and stuffed in the saddle-bags with the man’s clothing, closing up the ant-hill with bits of ground to look as natural as possible. Like a sinner hiding his deed of sin, the hider started once and looked round, but yet there was no one near save a “meerkat,” who had lifted herself out of her hole and sat on her hind legs watching. He did not like that even she should see, and when he rose she dived away into her hole. Then he walked on leisurely, that the dusk might have reached the village streets before he walked there. The first house was the smith’s, and before the open door two idle urchins lolled. As he hurried up the street in the gathering gloom he heard them laugh long and loudly behind him. He glanced round fearingly, and would almost have fled, but that the strange skirts clung about his legs. And after all it was only a spark that had alighted on the head of one, and not the strange figure they laughed at.

The door of the hotel stood wide open, and the light fell out into the street. He knocked, and the landlady came. She peered out to look for the cart that had brought the traveller; but Gregory’s heart was brave now he was so near the quiet room. He told her he had come with the transport-wagons that stood outside the town.

He had walked in, and wanted lodgings for the night.

It was a deliberate lie, glibly told; he would have told fifty, though the recording angel had stood in the next room with his pen dipped in the ink. What was it to him? He remembered that she lay there saying always, “I am better.”

The landlady put his supper in the little parlor where he had sat in the morning. When it was on the table she sat down in the rocking-chair, as her fashion was, to knit and talk, that she might gather news for her customers in the tap-room. In the white face under the queer, deep-fringed cap she saw nothing of the morning’s traveller. The new-comer was communicative. She was a nurse by profession, she said; had come to the Transvaal, hearing that good nurses were needed there. She had not yet found work. The landlady did not perhaps know whether there would be any for her in that town?