Hansie laughed.
"I wonder where Mauser could have been with her kittens last night!" she exclaimed, putting her hand into the deep hollow of the tree. "The nest is empty. Do you know, Jim?"
"No, little Missie. I 'spose Mauser's time had not come yet," he said, with stolid philosophy.
"I suppose not."
But alas, alas! Mauser's time was soon to come, for the soldiers, setting a strong trap to catch a wild cat which was nightly plundering them of their meat ration, caught Hansie's beloved Mauser instead, killing her instantly.
No reproaches from her mother were added to her keen remorse as she bent over the motherless kittens, whispering: "I will care for you, as she would have done; but oh, remember this, that honesty is the best policy, and all is not fair in love and war."
Tragedy was in the air.
A bee-keeper came to Harmony one morning to help Mrs. van Warmelo to take out honey from the hives, and this disturbance, combined with the fact that the soldiers had unwisely set up a smithy near the beehives under the row of blue-gum trees dividing their camp from Harmony, enraged the bees so much with the noise and the smoke and heat of the smithy fires, that they attacked man and beast in vicious fury.