“Yes; you should have come long ago.” There was something relentless and fateful in the sound of that voice, so soft and stern. “Now, it is too late.”
“No,” he said violently. “It is not. I have come to take you away and never let you go again. I cannot do without you any longer.”
She gave one of her strange terrible sighs, and spite of his firm words he felt the cold thing creep a little nearer to his heart.
“Where is your husband, Frances?” God knew what made him ask. He cared little enough for the whereabouts of old de Beer. Yet the answer was extraordinarily disconcerting.
“He is over there.” She made a gesture and he jerked his head round abruptly. There was nothing to be seen in the direction her hand had indicated. Nothing but the lonely tree. He looked at her piercingly then, with a new inquiry in his glance, and a creeping, clutching fear for her mind.
“I heard that he was dead,” he said slowly.
“Yes, it is true. He is dead,” she answered quietly, looking past him to where she had pointed. Spite of himself he looked once more in the same direction. Again nothing but the tree.
But something else arrested his eye. Grietje had come back and was squatting by the fire, and at her side, playing in the dust, was the toddling dumpy figure of a little child. It must have come round with Grietje from the back of the house. Certainly it had not been there before.
“Whose child is that?” he asked in surprise. And the stern, still voice from the sunbonnet answered him:
“It is your child and mine.”