“Mameena,” I said, “tell me no more.  Setting your dreams on one side, can I be false to my friend, Saduko, who talks to me day and night of you?”

“Saduko!  Piff!” she exclaimed, with that expressive gesture of her hand.

“And can I be false,” I continued, seeing that Saduko was no good card to play, “to my friend, Umbezi, your father?”

“My father!” she laughed.  “Why, would it not please him to grow great in your shadow?  Only yesterday he told me to marry you, if I could, for then he would find a stick indeed to lean on, and be rid of Saduko’s troubling.”

Evidently Umbezi was a worse card even than Saduko, so I played another.

“And can I help you, Mameena, to tread a road that at the best must be red with blood?”

“Why not,” she asked, “since with or without you I am destined to tread that road, the only difference being that with you it will lead to glory and without you perhaps to the jackals and the vultures?  Blood!  Piff!  What is blood in Zululand?”

This card also having failed, I tabled my last.

“Glory or no glory, I do not wish to share it, Mameena.  I will not make war among a people who have entertained me hospitably, or plot the downfall of their Great Ones.  As you told me just now, I am nobody—­just one grain of sand upon a white shore—­but I had rather be that than a haunted rock which draws the heavens’ lightnings and is drenched with sacrifice.  I seek no throne over white or black, Mameena, who walk my own path to a quiet grave that shall perhaps not be without honour of its own, though other than you seek.  I will keep your counsel, Mameena, but, because you are so beautiful and so wise, and because you say you are fond of me—­for which I thank you—­I pray you put away these fearful dreams of yours that in the end, whether they succeed or fail, will send you shivering from the world to give account of them to the Watcher-on-high.”

“Not so, O Macumazana,” she said, with a proud little laugh.  “When your Watcher sowed my seed—­if thus he did—­he sowed the dreams that are a part of me also, and I shall only bring him back his own, with the flower and the fruit by way of interest.  But that is finished.  You refuse the greatness.  Now, tell me, if I sink those dreams in a great water, tying about them the stone of forgetfulness and saying:  ’Sleep there, O dreams; it is not your hour’—­if I do this, and stand before you just a woman who loves and who swears by the spirits of her fathers never to think or do that which has not your blessing—­will you love me a little, Macumazahn?”

Now I was silent, for she had driven me to the last ditch, and I knew not what to say.  Moreover, I will confess my weakness—­I was strangely moved.  This beautiful girl with the “fire in her heart,” this woman who was different from all other women that I had ever known, seemed to have twisted her slender fingers into my heart-strings and to be drawing me towards her.  It was a great temptation, and I bethought me of old Zikali’s saying in the Black Kloof, and seemed to hear his giant laugh.