For the rest she was far, or fore-seeing, like her mother, apprehending
the end of things by some strange instinct; also very faithful in
character.

Rachel was unhappy. She did not mind the hardship and the heat, for she
was accustomed to both, and her health was so perfect that it would have
needed much worse things to affect her. But she loved the baby that was
gone, and wondered whether she would ever see it again. On the whole she
thought so, for here that intuition of hers came in, but at the best she
was sure that there would be long to wait. She loved her mother also, and
grieved more for her than for herself, especially now when she was so ill.
Moreover, she knew and shared her mind. This journey, she felt, was
foolishness; her father was a man "led by a star" as the natives say, and
would follow it over the edge of the world and be no nearer. He was not
fit to have charge of her mother.

Of herself she did not think so much. Still, at Grahamstown, for a year or
so there had been other children for companions, Dutch most of them, it is
true, and all rough in mind and manner. Yet they were white and human.
While she played with them she could forget she knew so much more than
they did; that, for instance, she could read the Gospels in Greek--which
her father had taught her ever since she was a little child--while they
could scarcely spell them out in the Taal, or Boer dialect, and that they
had never heard even of William the Conqueror. She did not care
particularly about Greek and William the Conqueror, but she did care for
friends, and now they were all gone from her, gone like the baby, as far
off as William the Conqueror. And she, she was alone in the wilderness
with a father who talked and thought of Heaven all day long, and a mother
who lived in memories and walked in the shadow of doom, and oh! she was
unhappy.