"'Kornel!' I cried in horror.
"But he was white on the cheek-bones and breathing hard, and I could not soften him.
"'Rich man's daughter or poor man's wife,' he said, 'you are white, and must keep your station. It is my business to sell myself, not yours. Get you back to the house I have given you, and stay there.'
"And with that he picked up the soft bricks I had turned for him, and threw them one by one into the spruit.
"'Poverty and meanness and all,' he added, 'it shall not be said at your father's house that you worked for me. Nor that you lacked aught it became you to have, neither,' he added, with a quick heat of temper. 'Get to your house.'
"I slunk off, crying like a child, while he went back to the mud—and the labor.
"Next day came Pagan to pay for the work that was done. He drove up in his smart cart, and tiptoed his way daintily to the edge of the spruit where the bricks lay. He was an old man, very cleanly dressed, with hard white hair on his head and face, and a quick manner of looking from side to side like a little bird. In all his aspect there was nothing but spoke of easy wealth and the serenity of a well-ordered life; there was even that unkindly sharpness of tone and manner that is a dead-weight on the well-to-do. My husband was at work when he drove up, but he straightened his back, squared his broad shoulders, and came up from the mud, walking at the full of his height and smiling down at the rich man with half-closed eyes.
"'Daag, Heer Pagan,' he said to him, in the tone of one who needs and desires nothing, and held out his hand—mud from the elbow—with something lordly in the gesture. The rich man cocked his head quickly, in the way he had, and hung in the breeching for a moment, ere he rendered his hand to Kornel, with a reddening of the cheek above his white whisker that betrayed him, I thought, for a paltry soul.
"'I've come to see your bricks,' he said curtly, 'and to pay for 'em, if they're all right.'
"'Ah, the bricks,' said Kornel airily. 'Yes, to be sure. There they are. Go and count them, if you like, and then you can come to me at my house where the Vrouw du Plessis (which was me) will give us some coffee.'