“It shall be as you will, David,” answered Christina.  “I have no wish but yours, and neighbors are nothing to me.”

There was a pair of them, you see—­both Boers of the best, caring more for a good fire of their own than to see the smoke from another’s chimney soiling the sky.  Within a week of their agreement the wagons were creaking towards the rising sun, and the whips were saluting the morning.  David and Christina fronted a new world together, and sought virgin soil.  For a full month they journeyed out, and out-spanned at last, on a mellow evening, on their home.

“Could you live here, do you think, Christina?” asked David, smiling, and she smiled back at him and made no other answer.

There was no need for one, indeed, for no Boer could pass such a place.  It was a rise, a little rand, flowing out from a tall kopje, grass and bush to its crown, and at its skirts ran a wide spruit of clear water.  The veldt waved like a sea—­not nakedly and forlorn, but dotted with grey mimosa and big green dropsical aloes, that here and there showed a scarlet plume like a flame.  The country was thigh-deep in grass and spoke of game; as they looked, a springbok got up and fled.  So here they stayed.

David and his Kafirs built the house, such a house as you see only when the man who is to make his home in it puts his hand to the building.  David knew but one architecture, that of the great hills and the sky, and when all was done, the house and its background clove together like a picture in a fit frame, the one enhancing the other, the two being one in perfection.  It was thatched, with deep eaves, and these made a cool stoep and cast shadows on the windows; while the door was red, and took the eye at once, as do the plumes of the aloes.  It was not well devised—­to say so would be to lend David a credit not due to him; but it occurred excellently.

The next thing that occurred was a child, a son, and this set the pinnacle on their happiness.  His arrival was the one great event in many years, for the multiplication of David’s flocks and herds was so well graduated, the growth of his prosperity so steady and of so even a process, that it tended rather to content than to joy.  It was like having money rather than like getting it.  In the same barefoot quiet their youth left them, and the constant passing of days marked them, tenderly at first and then more deeply.  Their boy, Frikkie, was a man, and thinking of marrying, when the consciousness of the leak in their lives, stood up before them.

They were sitting of an evening on the stoep, watching the sun go down and pull his ribbons after him, when Christina spoke.

“David,” she said, “yesterday was twenty-five years since our marriage.  We—­we are growing old, David.”

She spoke with a falter, believing what she said.  For though the blood is running strong and warm, and the eye is as clear as the heart is loyal, twenty-five years is a weary while to count back to one’s youth.