He stood very still. It seemed as if something ice cold had entered his breast and was slowly approaching his heart. His voice jerked a little when he spoke again, very humbly.

"I should have come long ago."

"Yes; you should have come long ago." There was something relentless and fateful in the sound of that voice, so soft and stern. "Now, it is too late."

"No," he said violently. "It is not. I have come to take you away and never let you go again. I cannot do without you any longer."

She gave one of her strange terrible sighs, and spite of his firm words he felt the cold thing creep a little nearer to his heart.

"Where is your husband, Frances?" God knew what made him ask. He cared little enough for the whereabouts of old de Beer. Yet the answer was extraordinarily disconcerting.

"He is over there." She made a gesture and he jerked his head round abruptly. There was nothing to be seen in the direction her hand had indicated. Nothing but the lonely tree. He looked at her piercingly then, with a new inquiry in his glance, and a creeping, clutching fear for her mind.

"I heard that he was dead," he said slowly.

"Yes, it is true. He is dead," she answered quietly, looking past him to where she had pointed. Spite of himself he looked once more in the same direction. Again nothing but the tree.

But something else arrested his eye. Grietje had come back and was squatting by the fire, and at her side, playing in the dust, was the toddling dumpy figure of a little child. It must have come round with Grietje from the back of the house. Certainly it had not been there before.

"Whose child is that?" he asked in surprise. And the stern, still voice from the sunbonnet answered him:

"It is your child and mine."

"My God!"

After a long time he said again, brokenly, with bitter self-accusation.

"My God! Frances, forgive me! I did not know. How was I to know?"

She did not answer.

"Can you ever forgive me?"

"Yes, as I hope for forgiveness," she said.

There was a dull solemnity in her tone and she did not touch the hand he stretched out. Unobserved by him the little toddling child had come up and now flung itself against its mother’s knees hiding its face in her lap. It swung a little sunbonnet in its hand and by the fading light he could see the softly curling hair, black as his own, and the outline of a small tender face. He knew that her child and his could not but be beautiful, and stood staring there, trembling, the magic of fatherhood on him and an urgent longing to catch the little creature in his arms. Suddenly it turned to him, and in the same moment the mother raised a pale, warning finger and laid it across her lips in token that he must be silent. So he did not cry out at what he saw.

The little face that promised such flower-like beauty had been transformed into a thing of horror by a piece of diabolically clever tattooing. A monstrous purple and red spider sprawled its bloated form and lobster-like claws upon the delicate rose-leaf skin. Neither tarantula nor octopus, it possessed all the worst attributes of each. It’s puffed-out body crouched in the centre of the face upon the nose and cheek bones, and the child’s bright violet eyes seemed the staring strange eyes of the beast. Its claws sprayed and curled about the mouth, reached out to the ears, and lost themselves in tendrils of hair upon the forehead! The thing seemed too hideous in conception to be the work of anyone but a mad devil, yet there was in it some sinister suggestion of human hands.

Carden knew not what supernatural or other power kept him there, staring with agonised eyes at the face of his child, when his every instinct was to turn and run as he had never run from anything in his life. The child broke the spell by dancing away with a pretty elfin laugh to rejoin Grietje by the fire. The quality of her laugh and the light patter of her feet brought home to Carden the realisation that it was a girl whose beauty had been thus cruelly destroyed forever, and a groan broke from him. The woman watching him with her tragic eyes saw sweat standing in little beads on his lips.

"He did it," she said. "That is why he lies dead over there" Her eyes travelled past Carden once more to where the lonely tree waved an arm in the evening breeze.

"He did not come back for eleven months after you had passed," she continued in her sad relentless voice. "My baby was here when he returned—​so of course he knew. But he said nothing. I feared terribly for the child at first, but in the end I came to think that he did not care. Then, one day, when my fears were all asleep, he disappeared, taking my baby with him for three days. Grietje and I roamed the veld seeking them, and on the night of the third day as we drew near home again we heard the child crying, and coming in we found it with its lovely little face all swollen and black from the poisons he had put in. He was lying on the bench laughing, and called out to me as I came in:

"`There is your love child. But she will have to do without love.'"

"I was worn out with weeping and wandering for three days and nights, but when he said those words I rushed over to him and killed him. I killed him with these hands." She looked down on the hands lying on her lap.