"Where’d you spring from?" he demanded. She continued to stare at him. His voice which was common and brutal troubled her, and she did not like his face.

"Crazy!" he mused, looking at her keenly through half-closed eyes. "I’m not sure it wouldn’t be a good thing to give you a crack on the cocoa-nut and leave you to the aasvogels. You’ll only be a darned nuisance."

She understood very well what he was saying, but somehow it did not terrify her. Nothing terrified her except the thought of being left alone. He tried her with another question.

"How long you been lost?"

She waved her hand towards the trees that fringed the river bank. Why she did this she had not the faintest idea.

"Ach!" he exclaimed impatiently, and turned on his heel. "Come on to my waggons, you fool."

Without any indignation at his way of addressing her, she fell into step beside him. A few paces farther on, two natives bounded into sight, coming towards the man as though searching for him. He addressed them in Kaffir, pointing backwards to where he had left the buck. They gazed at Vivienne with impassive faces. Both parties continued on their way.

At last Vivienne’s eyes fell once more upon the broad dusty road, and a hundred yards or so from it two transport waggons were drawn up and outspanned. At the sight of them, and the smouldering fires, and a dog that jumped up barking, and the smell of newly-baked bread, something in the girl’s breast gave a great throb, and she had speech.

"Since yesterday," she said, answering the question the man had asked her some twenty minutes past.

"Oh! you’ve found your tongue have you," said he. "Since yesterday what?"

"Lost."

"Lost since yesterday?" he stared at her wonderingly. "Oh! you’re mad, right enough, young fellah. The sun’s done your business for you. Here! come and eat."

She was not too mad to understand that at any rate. There were some loaves of newly-made dough bread lying on a box, each broken in two to let the steam out. Several other boxes were scattered about and the man motioning her to one handed her half a loaf. She took it eagerly, and began to eat at once, almost wolfishly. When she had finished she looked longingly at the other loaves.

"No, you don’t," said the man, "you’ve had enough for one go." He had called out an order to some young native boys squatting by the fire, and they now set a tin kettle full of coffee and two beakers before him. He handed her one of the beakers full of hot black liquid and she drank even to the last drop.

"Now," said he, speaking roughly and emphatically as if to a child with no intelligence. "What you want is sleep. Go and get up into that waggon tent, and sleep, do you understand? No use turning in on the ground for we’re going to trek in an hour. Get off with you now, and sleep till you burst." His tone was the tone of a born bully, but the girl did not resent it. She climbed on to the waggon-brake as easily as if she had been doing so all her life. A rude, but not unclean mattress surged up to meet her, and she sank into it and slept.

The waggon was moving when she awoke, a delicious slow movement which softly swung the mattress suspended on a wooden frame across the tent, from side to side, and was accompanied by strainings and rumblings, musical creakings as of a ship at sea, but without any of the malaise incidental to ships, for the level of the mattress was always maintained. When the wheels jolted over stones, Vivienne got no more discomfort of it than a bird snug in its nest. From the horseshoe opening of the tent, she could see a light haze of dust rising perpetually from under the wheels, and through it, the landscape rolling out and retreating in changing panorama. Everything was wonderfully peaceful. Sometimes she could hear far ahead the crack of a whip, and a long-drawn-out native cry; then the waggon would lumber more hurriedly through the dust for a while, only to return to the slow even movement of serenely pacing oxen.

Lying idly against her pillow, she watched the sun fall swiftly behind a kop, and the whole land become suffused with orange-coloured light. Then the silver-green of bush and tree turned black and kopjes were etched in India ink against the tinted skies.

Her eyes wandered round the tent in which she was lying. There was hardly anything in it except the bed, but from the hoops supporting the canvas various odds and ends of things were hanging; a lantern, a cheap clock, a small tin-bound square of mirror, several coarse canvas bags, evidently stuffed with clothes.

"I suppose they belong to the man who found me," she thought, and instantly recalled the coarse thick-lipped face, the peculiar sneering way his mouth drew up at one side under the ragged dark moustache, the sharp half-closed eyes. She recalled too his brutal way of speaking to her. No one had ever spoken to Vivienne Carlton in such a fashion, and it had impressed itself on her memory. In fact, it was the only thing that stood out since she knew she had lost herself by the pool. The rest was darkness.

"Hi! Young fellah!"

Her memory began from those words! But why "young fellah?" She had understanding now to marvel at such an address. Was it because of her short hair? The idea inspired her to kneel up on the bed and reach for the tin-backed mirror. She peeped in and, at the sight she met there, almost reeled backwards out of the waggon. A face which under dirt and tan was darker than a Hindoo’s, scratched cheeks, sunken eyes, lips that were dried and cracked. A mop of short curly hair full of dust and bits of grass and dried leaves! A neck that was burnt almost black right down to where it met the ragged shirt collar. She could not even be sure that the eyes were her own, so deep were they in her head.

The shock sent her back to her pillow, and she lay there a long time very still. But her mind was clear enough now to realise why the man had mistaken her for a "young fellow." She was a tall, athletic girl whose love of outdoor exercises had conformed her figure to a boyish flexibility and litheness rather than feminine plumpness. Moreover, such superfluous flesh as she had once possessed was now gone. The veld had turned her into a lanky, dirty, hungry-looking lout of a boy. She could not help laughing, but a moment later her face grew stern to consternation. The feeling of safety engendered by being once more in touch with people was dispersing the terror of the veld, but another horror now took its place! Her beauty was gone! The one great wand she possessed, the pivot round which all her plans revolved. It would take months to get back her complexion and contours—​if she ever got them back!

She stared at her dark hands, blistered and torn, with black rims to them.

"How awful if this ever gets known!"

So far, the world with all its cruelty and malice had never been able to touch her spotless reputation, or Mrs Grundy heave a brick at her for outraged conventions. But now? If this became known? Lost on the veld! Picked up by a strange man, kept in a waggon, travelling alone with him on the veld! What tit-bits to be rolled round the tongues of her enemies!