worse, for if the English bully us the Scotch bully us and cheat us into
the bargain. Well, your parents were drowned, and have been in Heaven
for a long time, but I am sorry to say that all your relations were not
drowned with them. At first, however, they took no trouble to hunt for
you when we should have been glad enough to give you up."

"No," broke in Suzanne and I with one voice, and I added, "How do you
dare to tell such lies in the face of the Lord, Jan?"

"----When it would not have been so bad to give you up," he went on,
correcting himself. "But now it seems that had you lived you would have
inherited estates, or titles, or both."

"Is the boy dead then?" I asked.

"Be silent, wife, I mean--had he lived a Scotchman. Therefore, having
made inquiries, and learned that a lad of your name and age had been
rescued from a shipwreck and was still alive among the Boers in the
Transkei, they have set to work to hunt you, and are coming here to take
you way, for I tell you that I heard it in the dorp yonder."

"Is it so?" said Ralph, while Suzanne hung upon his words with white
face and trembling lips. "Then I tell you that I will not go. I may be
English, but my home is here. My own father and mother are dead, and
these strangers are nothing to me, nor are the estates and titles far
away anything to me. All that I hold dear on the earth is here in the
Transkei," and he glanced at Suzanne, who seemed to bless him with her
eyes.

"You talk like a fool," said Jan, but in a voice which was full of joy