The farmer and his wife were Boers, but they spoke English.  Mr. Jan Willem Klaas himself was a fine specimen of the breed—­tall, erect, broad-shouldered, and genial.  Mrs. Klaas, his wife, was mainly suggestive, in mind and person, of suet-pudding.  There was one prattling little girl of three years old, by name Sannie, a most engaging child; and also a chubby baby.

“You are betrothed, of course?” Mrs. Klaas said to Hilda before me, with the curious tactlessness of her race, when we made our first arrangement.

Hilda’s face flushed.  “No; we are nothing to one another,” she answered—­which was only true formally.  “Dr. Cumberledge had a post at the same hospital in London where I was a nurse; and he thought he would like to try Rhodesia.  That is all.”

Mrs. Klaas gazed from one to other of us suspiciously.  “You English are strange!” she answered, with a complacent little shrug.  “But there—­from Europe!  Your ways, we know, are different.”

Hilda did not attempt to explain.  It would have been impossible to make the good soul understand.  Her horizon was so simple.  She was a harmless housewife, given mostly to dyspepsia and the care of her little ones.  Hilda had won her heart by unfeigned admiration for the chubby baby.  To a mother, that covers a multitude of eccentricities, such as one expects to find in incomprehensible English.  Mrs. Klaas put up with me because she liked Hilda.

We spent some months together on Klaas’s farm.  It was a dreary place, save for Hilda.  The bare daub-and-wattle walls; the clumps of misshapen and dusty prickly-pears that girt round the thatched huts of the Kaffir workpeople; the stone-penned sheep-kraals, and the corrugated iron roof of the bald stable for the waggon oxen—­ all was as crude and ugly as a new country can make things.  It seemed to me a desecration that Hilda should live in such an unfinished land—­Hilda, whom I imagined as moving by nature through broad English parks, with Elizabethan cottages and immemorial oaks—­ Hilda, whose proper atmosphere seemed to be one of coffee-coloured laces, ivy-clad abbeys, lichen-incrusted walls—­all that is beautiful and gracious in time-honoured civilisations.

Nevertheless, we lived on there in a meaningless sort of way—­I hardly knew why.  To me it was a puzzle.  When I asked Hilda, she shook her head with her sibylline air and answered, confidently:  “You do not understand Sebastian as well as I do.  We have to wait for him.  The next move is his.  Till he plays his piece, I cannot tell how I may have to checkmate him.”

So we waited for Sebastian to advance a pawn.  Meanwhile, I toyed with South African farming—­not very successfully, I must admit.  Nature did not design me for growing oats.  I am no judge of oxen, and my views on the feeding of Kaffir sheep raised broad smiles on the black faces of my Mashona labourers.