On an ocean-steamer she found herself at last—alone, for in that crowd there was no face familiar to her to be seen.
She mixed freely with the crowd; she sought, in the games with which these voyages usually are passed, to forget—to forget; but the nights of sleeplessness remained—her waking terror, with which she was consumed.
Two men there were who proved sympathetic, one a Scotchman, the other an Englishman—both anti-Boer and sadly misinformed when first she met them, both "converts" by the time they reached their native shores.
Sitting at table she listened intently to the conversations on the war—the war, the never-ending war. On no occasion did she breathe a word of what she knew, of what she felt, until one day at dinner a young English lieutenant, "covered with glory" and returning home a hero of the war, enlarged on the services rendered by one brave officer, well known by name to Hansie.
"It is not only what he achieved with so much success in the field," he continued. "I am thinking now of those two years he spent in the Pretoria Forts before the war, as a common labourer, doing menial work with other men, and secretly making plans and drawing charts of the Pretoria fortifications. Every detail was made known to our military before we went to war."
Exclamations of surprise, a murmur of admiration, ran along the table.
Hansie waited until there was a lull, and then she asked:
"The work carried out by him, was it done under oath of allegiance to the Transvaal Government?"
There was one moment's painful silence before the young lieutenant answered, with a laugh: