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The Dutchwoman blushed, shook her head, and pointed to herself. Carefully, intently, Bonaparte looked from the picture in his hand to Tant Sannie's features, and from the features back to the picture. Then slowly a light broke over his countenance, he looked up, it became a smile; he looked back at the miniature, his whole countenance was effulgent.

The lady in Tant Sannie's bedroom was a gorgeous creature from a fashion-sheet, which the Boer-woman, somewhere obtaining, had pasted up at the foot of her bed, to be profoundly admired by the children. "It would be very nice," said Em; but it seemed a dream of quite too transcendent a glory ever to be realized.

A different life showed itself in the front of the house, where Tant Sannie's cart stood ready inspanned and the Boer-woman herself sat in the front room drinking coffee. She had come to visit her stepdaughter, probably for the last time, as she now weighed two hundred and sixty pounds, and was not easily able to move.

The little room, kept carefully closed in Tant Sannie's time, was well lighted by a paraffin lamp; books and work lay strewn about it, and it wore a bright, habitable aspect. Beside the lamp at the table in the corner sat Lyndall, the open letters and papers of the day's post lying scattered before her, while she perused the columns of a newspaper.

It was at this stage of the proceedings on the night of Tant Sannie's wedding that Lyndall sat near the doorway in one of the side-rooms, to watch the dancers as they appeared and disappeared in the yellow cloud of dust. Gregory sat moodily in a corner of the large dancing-room. His little betrothed touched his arm.

Em's little face grew very grave at last, and she knelt up and extended her hands over the drawer of linen. "Oh, God!" she said, "I am so glad! I do not know what I have done that I should be so glad. Thank you!" She was more like a princess, yes, far more like a princess, than the lady who still hung on the wall in Tant Sannie's bedroom. So Em thought.

"Come, draw your chair a little closer," she said, and their elbows now touching, they sat on through the night. The next morning at dawn, as Em passed through Tant Sannie's bedroom, she found the Boer-woman pulling off her boots preparatory to climbing into bed. "Where is Piet Vander Walt?" "Just gone," said Tant Sannie; "and I am going to marry him this day four weeks.

I hope I do not disturb you, my dear friend," said Bonaparte, late one evening, putting his nose in at the cabin door, where the German and his son sat finishing their supper. It was now two months since he had been installed as schoolmaster in Tant Sannie's household, and he had grown mighty and more mighty day by day.

I am dead sleepy," she added; "the stupid thing doesn't know how to talk love-talk at all," and she climbed into the four-poster, clothes and all, and drew the quilt up to her chin. On the day preceding Tant Sannie's wedding, Gregory Rose sat in the blazing sun on the stone wall behind his daub-and-wattle house.

In the front room the little woolly Kaffer girl was washing Tant Sannie's feet in a small tub, and Bonaparte, who sat on the wooden sofa, was pulling off his shoes and stockings that his own feet might be washed also.