The child wept, and crept closer to the ground.

...


The Sacrifice.

The farm by daylight was not as the farm by moonlight. The plain was a
weary flat of loose red sand, sparsely covered by dry karoo bushes, that
cracked beneath the tread like tinder, and showed the red earth everywhere.
Here and there a milk-bush lifted its pale-coloured rods, and in every
direction the ants and beetles ran about in the blazing sand. The red
walls of the farmhouse, the zinc roofs of the outbuildings, the stone walls
of the kraals, all reflected the fierce sunlight, till the eye ached and
blenched. No tree or shrub was to be seen far or near. The two sunflowers
that stood before the door, out-stared by the sun, drooped their brazen
faces to the sand; and the little cicada-like insects cried aloud among the
stones of the kopje.

The Boer-woman, seen by daylight, was even less lovely than when, in bed,
she rolled and dreamed. She sat on a chair in the great front room, with
her feet on a wooden stove, and wiped her flat face with the corner of her
apron, and drank coffee, and in Cape Dutch swore that the beloved weather
was damned. Less lovely, too, by daylight was the dead Englishman's child,
her little stepdaughter, upon whose freckles and low, wrinkled forehead the
sunlight had no mercy.

"Lyndall," the child said to her little orphan cousin, who sat with her on
the floor threading beads, "how is it your beads never fall off your