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Aroused thus from some day-dream into which I had fallen, I glanced up, and, looking in the direction of the sound, became aware of a small cloud of dust gleaming yellow in the afternoon sun, about a mile away to the eastward; and in the midst of it appeared two mounted figures which, even at that distance, I identified without difficulty as Mr Lestrange, our next-door neighbour at Triannon, some fourteen miles away, and his eleven-year-old daughter Nell.
There had undoubtedly been a conflagration, which had destroyed the house; and my father and mother, with the house "boys", had in all probability gone over to Triannon, whither, no doubt, the stock had also been driven.
Thus it soon transpired that, in the eastern provinces, an imaginary line drawn from the mouth of the Great Kei River through Triannon and Bella Vista, and thence northward along the meridian of 26 degrees east longitude to the Zour Bergen, represented the southern limit of the savages' depredations; while beyond the Zour Bergen, to the north and west, we were unable to learn anything definite.
Such is the palace, which, in all its one-storied magnificence of Languedoc marble, in the garden of Versailles, still remains to this day. Any man can buy a square foot of land and plant a liberty-pole on it; but it takes a king to set apart whole acres for a grand triannon. But nowadays it is different; and furthermore, what originated in a necessity has been mounted into a vaunt.
As a matter of fact I felt quite easy in my mind about it, for I was confident that, even should a rising take place, it would be suppressed very promptly; and in any case I did not believe for a moment that the savages would dare to penetrate so far into the colony as Bella Vista, or even as far as Triannon: while the "scare", trifling and unfounded as I believed it to be, afforded me an excellent excuse for a trip to Port Elizabeth, which town I had not visited for more than six months, my father having accompanied the wagon on the previous journey; also it justified me in my determination to purchase a new rifle one of the very newest and most up-to-date weapons that I could possibly procure, the rifle which I had been using for the previous six years being a flintlock affair, and worn out at that.
Yet so it was; and in that curious, detached, semi-conscious frame of mind I covered the fourteen miles of veld that lay between Bella Vista and Triannon, most of it at a walking pace, coming in sight of the house about nine o'clock at night.
She was bareheaded and barefooted, the garment which she wore being a sort of frock apparently modelled from those which she had worn while at Triannon, and made of a peculiar kind of cloth the nature of which I could not recognise.
The house at Triannon, built in a sort of elbow formed by one of the spurs of the Great Winter Berg, was not visible from the direction in which I approached until one had rounded the kopje concealing it, when one found oneself close upon it.
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