Now on the morrow at dawn, as had been arranged, Jan and Ralph rode away
to the warm veldt with the cattle, leaving me and Suzanne to look after
the farm. Three days later the Scotchmen came, and then it was that for
love of Ralph and for the sake of the happiness of my daughter I sinned
the greatest sin of all my life--the sin that was destined to shape the
fates of others yet unborn.

I was seated on the _stoep_ in the afternoon when I saw three white men
and some Cape boys, their servants, riding up to the house.

"Here come those who would steal my boy from me," I thought to myself,
and, like Pharaoh, I hardened my heart.

Now in those days my sight was very good, and while the men were yet
some way off I studied them all and made up my mind about them. First
there was a large young man of five-and-twenty or thereabouts, and I
noted with a sort of fear that he was not unlike to Ralph. The eyes were
the same and the shape of the forehead, only this gentleman had a weak,
uncertain mouth, and I judged that he was very good-humoured, but of an
indolent mind. By his side rode another man of quite a different stamp,
and middle-aged. "The lawyer," I said to myself as I looked at his
weasel-like face, bushy eyebrows, and red hair. Indeed, that was an
easy guess, for who can mistake a lawyer, whatever his race may be? That
trade is stronger than any blood, and leaves the same seal on all who
follow it. Doubtless if those lawyers of whom the Lord speaks hard
things in the Testament were set side by side with the lawyers who draw
mortgage bonds and practise usury here in South Africa, they would prove
to be as like to each other as are the grains of corn upon one mealie