"Thank you, uncle," she said, and kissed him; then turned and went.

Old Croft took off his broad hat and polished his bald head with a red
pocket-handkerchief.

"There's something up with that girl," he said aloud to a lizard that
had crept out of the crevices of the stone wall to bask in the sun. "I
am not such a fool as I look, and I say that there is something wrong
with her. She is odder than ever," and he hit viciously at the lizard
with his stick, whereon it promptly bolted into its crack, returning
presently to see if the irate "human" had departed.

"However," he soliloquised, as he made his way to the house, "I am glad
that it was not Bessie. I couldn't bear, at my time of life, to part
with Bessie, even for a couple of months."



CHAPTER VIII

JESS GOES TO PRETORIA

That day, at dinner, Jess suddenly announced that she was going on the
morrow to Pretoria to see Jane Neville.

"To see Jane Neville!" said Bessie, opening her blue eyes wide. "Why,
it was only last month you said that you did not care about Jane Neville
now, because she had grown so vulgar. Don't you remember when she
stopped here on her way down to Natal last year, and held up her fat