just twenty, and Jess is twenty-three. Lord, to think that it is
twenty-three years since that girl was born! And theirs is a queer story
too."

"Indeed?" said his listener interrogatively.

"Ay," Silas went on absently, knocking out his pipe, and refilling it
from a big brown jar of coarse-cut Boer tobacco, "I'll tell it to you if
you like: you are going to live in the house, and you may as well know
it. I am sure, Captain Niel, that it will go no further. You see I
was born in England, yes, and well-born too. I come from
Cambridgeshire--from the fat fen-land down round Ely. My father was a
clergyman. Well, he wasn't rich, and when I was twenty he gave me his
blessing, thirty sovereigns in my pocket, and my passage to the Cape;
and I shook his hand, God bless him, and off I came, and here in the old
colony and this country I have been for fifty years, for I was seventy
yesterday. Well, I'll tell you more about that another time, it's of the
girls I'm speaking now. After I left home--some years after--my dear
old father married again, a youngish woman with some money, but rather
beneath him in life, and by her he had one son, and then died. Well, it
was but little I heard of my half-brother, except that he had turned
out very badly, married, and taken to drink, till one night some twelve
years ago, when a strange thing happened. I was sitting here in this
very room, ay, in this very chair--for this part of the house was up
then, though the wings weren't built--smoking my pipe, and listening to
the lashing of the rain, for it was a very foul night, when suddenly an
old pointer dog I had, named Ben, began to bark.

"'Lie down, Ben, it's only the Kafirs,' said I.