"What on earth is the veld?" asks the lady of the red umbrella, with acerbity. "I'm sick of seeing the word in the papers, and nobody seems to know what it means."
Lynette's soft voice answers:
"You can never know what it means until you have lived its life, and it has become part of yours. It spreads away farther than your eyes can follow it, for miles and miles. It is jade colour in spring, blue-green in early summer, desolate, scorching yellow-brown in winter, with dreadful black tracts of cinders, where it has been burned to let the young grass grow up. There is hardly a tree; there is scarcely a bird, except a vulture, a black speck high in the hot blue sky. There are flat-topped mountains and cone-shaped kopjes, reddish, or pale pink, or mauve-coloured, as they are nearer or farther away. And that is all!"
"All?"
"All, except the sunshine, bathing everything, soaking you through and through."
"But there is not always sunshine? It must be sometimes night?" argues Lessie, a little peevishly.
"There are deep violet nights, full of great white stars," Lynette answers. "There are storms of dust and rain, lightning and thunder, such as are only read of here.... There are plots, conspiracies, raids, robberies, murders, slumps and losses, plagues and massacres. There are rebellions of white men, and native risings. There have been wars; there is war to-day, and there will be war again in the days that are yet to come!"
She has almost forgotten the little woman beside her, staring at her with big, brown, rather animal eyes. Now she turns to her with her rare and lovely smile:
"The war that is going on now began at the little village-town where I was a Convent schoolgirl. We were shut for months within the lines. But, of course, you have read the newspaper accounts of the Siege of Gueldersdorp? I am only telling you what you know!"
Lessie laughs, and the laugh has the hard, unpleasant, mirthless little tinkle of a toy dog's collar-bell, or bits of crushed ice rattled in a champagne-glass.