David turned and looked at her.  He saw for a moment with her eyes—­ saw that the tenseness of her girlhood had vanished, and he was astonished.  But he knew he was strong and hale, well set-up and a good man to be friends with, and as he gripped his knees, he felt the tough muscle under his fingers, and it restored him.

“Christina,” he said, seeing she was troubled, “it is the same with both of us.  You are not afraid to grow old with me, little cousin?”

She came closer to him but said nothing.  It was soon after that, and a wonderful thing in its way, such as David had never heard of before, that there came to them another boy, a wee rascal that shattered all the cobwebs of twenty-five years, and gave Christina something better to think of than the footsteps of time.

Frikkie had been glorious enough in his time, and was glorious enough still, for the matter of that; but this was a creature with exceptional points, which neither David nor Christina—­nor, to do him justice, Frikkie—­could possibly overlook.  Frikkie had a voice like a bell, and whiskers like the father of a family, and stood six foot two in his naked feet, and lacked no excellence that a sturdy bachelor should possess.  But the other, who was born to the name of Paul, lamented his arrival with a vociferous note of disappointment in the world that was indescribably endearing; had a head clothed in down like the intimate garments of an ostrich chick, and was small enough for David to put in his pocket.  He brought a new horizon with him and imposed it on his parents; he was, in brief, a thing to make a deacon of a Jew peddler.

Thereafter, life for David and Christina was no longer a single phenomenon, but a series of developments.  It was like sailing in agreeably rough water.  No pensive mood could survive the sight of mighty Frikkie gambolling like a young bull in the company of Paul; nor could quiet hours impart a melancholy while the welkin rang with the voice of the kleintje bullying the adoring Kafirs.  Where before life had glided, now it steeplechased, taking its days bull-headed, and Paul grew to the age of four as a bamboo grows, in leaps.

Then Frikkie, the huge, the hairy, the heavy-footed, the man who prided himself on his ability to make circumstances, discovered, in a revealing flash, that he was, after all, a poor creature, and that the brightest being on earth was Katje Voss, whose people had settled about thirty miles off—­next door, as it were.  Katje held views not entirely dissimilar, but she consented to marry him, and the big youth walked on air.  Katje was a dumpy Boer girl, with a face all cream and roses, and a figure that gave promise of much fat hereafter.  Christina had imagined other things, but the ideal is a rickety structure, and she yielded; while David had never considered such an emergency, and consented heartily.  Behind Frikkie’s back he talked of grandchildren, and was exceedingly happy.