attentively. She was a woman with as little vanity in her composition as
it is possible for a woman to have, and till now she had not given her
personal looks much consideration. They had not been of great importance
to her in the Wakkerstroom district of the Transvaal. But to-night all
of a sudden they became very important; and so she stood and looked at
her own wonderful eyes, at the masses of curling brown hair still damp
and shining from the rain, at the curious pallid face and clear-cut
determined mouth.

"If it were not for my eyes and hair, I should be very ugly," she said
to herself aloud. "If only I were beautiful like Bessie, now." The
thought of her sister gave her another idea. What if John were to prefer
Bessie? Now she remembered that he had been very attentive to Bessie.
A feeling of dreadful doubt and jealousy passed through her, for women
like Jess know what jealousy is in its bitterness. Supposing that it was
in vain, supposing that what she had given to-day--given utterly once
and for all, so that she could not take it back--had been given to a man
who loved another woman, and that woman her own dear sister! Supposing
that the fate of her love was to be like water falling unalteringly
on the hard rock that heeds it not and retains it not! True, the water
wears the rock away; but could she be satisfied with that? She could
master him, she knew; even if things were so, she could win him to
herself, she had read it in his eyes that afternoon; but could she, who
had promised to her dead mother to cherish and protect her sister, whom
till this day she had loved better than anything in the world, and
whom she still loved more dearly than her life--could she, if it should
happen to be thus, rob that sister of her lover? And if it should be so,
what would her life be like? It would be like the great pillar after the
lightning had smitten it, a pile of shattered smoking fragments, a very
heaped-up debris of a life. She could feel it even now. No wonder, then,