“A favour? Why, God bless the girl, how pale you look!—not but what you are always pale. Well, what is it now?”
“I want to go up to Pretoria by the post-cart that leaves Wakkerstroom to-morrow afternoon, and to stop for a couple of months with my schoolfellow, Jane Neville. I have often promised to go, and I have never gone.”
“Well, I never!” said the old man. “My stay-at-home Jess wanting to go away, and without Bessie too! What is the matter with you?”
“I want a change, uncle—I do indeed. I hope you won’t thwart me in this.”
Silas looked at her steadily with his keen grey eyes.
“Humph!” he said; “you want to go away, and there’s an end of it. Best not ask too many questions where a maid is concerned. Very well, my dear, go if you like, though I shall miss you.”
“Thank you, uncle,” she said, and kissed him; then turned and went.
Old Croft took off his broad hat and polished his bald head with a red pocket-handkerchief.
“There’s something up with that girl,” he said aloud to a lizard that had crept out of the crevices of the stone wall to bask in the sun. “I am not such a fool as I look, and I say that there is something wrong with her. She is odder than ever,” and he hit viciously at the lizard with his stick, whereon it promptly bolted into its crack, returning presently to see if the irate “human” had departed.
“However,” he soliloquised, as he made his way to the house, “I am glad that it was not Bessie. I couldn’t bear, at my time of life, to part with Bessie, even for a couple of months.”