“Where is my brother?” cried Nada when we came back.
“Lost,” I answered. “Lost, never to be found again.”
Then the girl gave a great and bitter cry, and fell to the earth saying, “I would that I were dead with my brother!”
“Let us be going,” said Macropha, my wife.
“Have you no tears to weep for your son?” asked a man of our company.
“What is the use of weeping over the dead? Does it, then, bring them back?” she answered. “Let us be going!”
The man thought these words strange, but he did not know that Umslopogaas was not born of Macropha.
Still, we waited in that place a day, thinking that, perhaps, the lioness would return to her den and that, at least, we might kill her. But she came back no more. So on the next morning we rolled up our blankets and started forward on our journey, sad at heart. In truth, Nada was so weak from grief that she could hardly travel, but I never heard the name of Umslopogaas pass her lips again during that journey. She buried him in her heart and said nothing. And I too said nothing, but I wondered why it had been brought about that I should save the life of Umslopogaas from the jaws of the Lion of Zulu, that the lioness of the rocks might devour him.
And so the time went on till we reached the kraal where the king’s business must be done, and where I and my wife should part.
On the morning after we came to the kraal, having kissed in secret, though in public we looked sullenly on one another, we parted as those part who meet no more, for it was in our thoughts, that we should never see each other’s face again, nor, indeed, did we do so. And I drew Nada aside and spoke to her thus: “We part, my daughter; nor do I know when we shall meet again, for the times are troubled and it is for your safety and that of your mother that I rob my eyes of the sight of you. Nada, you will soon be a woman, and you will be fairer than any woman among our people, and it may come about that many great men will seek you in marriage, and, perhaps, that I, your father, shall not be there to choose for you whom you shall wed, according to the custom of our land. But I charge you, as far as may be possible for you to do so, take only a man whom you can love, and be faithful to him alone, for thus shall a woman find happiness.”