The voyage to the Cape was long and tedious. On the whole way out, Guy made but few friends, and talked very little to his fellow passengers. That unhappy recognition by Granville Kelmscott the evening he went on board the Cetewayo poisoned the fugitive’s mind for the entire passage. He felt himself, in fact, a moral outcast; he slunk away from his kind; he hardly dared to meet Kelmscott’s eyes for shame, whenever he passed him. But for one thing at least he was truly grateful. Though Kelmscott had evidently discovered from the papers the nature of Guy’s crime, and knew his real name well, it was clear he had said nothing of any sort on the subject to the other passengers. Only one man on board was aware of his guilt, Guy believed, and that one man he shunned accordingly as far as was possible within the narrow limits of the saloon and the quarter-deck.

Granville Kelmscott, of course, took a very different view of Guy Waring’s position. He had read in the paper he bought at Plymouth that Guy was the murderer of Montague Nevitt. Regarding him, therefore, as a criminal of the deepest dye now flying from justice, he wasn’t at all surprised at Guy’s shrinking and shunning him; what astonished him rather was the man’s occasional and incredible fits of effrontery. How that fellow could ever laugh and talk at all among the ladies on deck—with the hangman at his back—simply appalled and horrified the proud soul of a Kelmscott. Granville had hard work to keep from expressing his horror openly at times. But still, with an effort, he kept his peace. With the picture of his father and Lady Emily now strong before his mind, he couldn’t find it in his heart to bring his own half-brother, however guilty and criminal the man might be, to the foot of the gallows.

So they voyaged on together without once interchanging a single word, all the way from Plymouth to the Cape Colony. And the day they landed at Port Elizabeth, it was an infinite relief indeed to Guy to think he could now get well away for ever from that fellow Kelmscott. Not being by any means over-burdened with ready cash, however, Guy determined to waste no time in the coastwise towns, but to make his way at once boldly up country towards Kimberley. The railway ran then only as far as Grahamstown; the rest of his journey to the South African Golconda was accomplished by road, in a two-wheeled cart, drawn by four small horses, which rattled along with a will, up hill and down dale, over the precarious highways of that semi-civilized upland.

To Guy, just fresh from England and the monotonous sea, there was a certain exhilaration in this first hasty glimpse of the infinite luxuriance of sub-tropical nature. At times he almost forgot Montague Nevitt and the forgery in the boundless sense of freedom and novelty given him by those vast wastes of rolling tableland, thickly covered with grass or low thorny acacias, and stretching illimitably away in low range after range to the blue mountains in the distance. It was strange indeed to him on the wide plains through which they scurried in wild haste to see the springbok rush away from the doubtful track at the first whirr of their wheels, or the bolder bustard stand and gaze among the long grass, with his wary eye turned sideways to look at them. Guy felt for the moment he had left Europe and its reminiscences now fairly behind him; in this free new world, he was free once more himself; his shame was cast aside; he could revel like the antelopes in the immensity of a land where nobody knew him and he knew nobody.

What added most of all, however, to this quaint new sense of vastness and freedom was the occasional appearance of naked blacks, roaming at large through the burnt-up fields of which till lately they had been undisputed possessors. Day after day Guy drove on along the uncertain roads, past queer outlying towns of white wooden houses—Cradock, and Middelburg, and Colesberg, and others—till they crossed at last the boundary of Orange River into the Free State, and halted for a while in the main street of Philippolis.

It was a dreary place; Guy began now to see the other side of South Africa. Though he had left England in autumn, it was spring-time at the Cape, and the winter drought had parched up all the grass, leaving the bare red dust in the roads or streets as dry and desolate as the sand of the desert. The town itself consisted of some sixty melancholy and distressful houses, bare, square, and flat-roofed, standing unenclosed along a dismal high-road, and with that congenitally shabby look, in spite of their newness, which seems to belong by nature to all southern buildings. Some stagnant pools alone remained to attest the presence after rain of a roaring brook, the pits in whose dried-up channel they now occupied; over their tops hung the faded foliage of a few dust-laden trees, struggling hard for life with the energy of despair against depressing circumstances. It was a picture that gave Guy a sudden attack of pessimism; if THIS was the El Dorado towards which he was going, he earnestly wished himself back again once more, forgery or no forgery, among the breezy green fields of dear old England.

On to Fauresmith he travelled with less comfort than before in a rickety buggy of most primitive construction, designed to meet the needs of rough mountain roads, and as innocent of springs as Guy himself of the murder of Montague Nevitt. It was a wretched drive. The drought had now broken; the wet season had begun; rain fell heavily. A piercing cold wind blew down from the nearer mountains; and Guy began to feel still more acutely than ever that South Africa was by no means an earthly paradise. As he drove on and on this feeling deepened upon him. Huge blocks of stone obstructed the rough road, intersected as it was by deep cart-wheel ruts, down which the rain-water now flowed in impromptu torrents. The Dutch driver, too, anxious to show the mettle of his coarse-limbed steeds, persisted in dashing over the hummocky ground at a break-neck pace, while Guy balanced himself with difficulty on the narrow seat, hanging on to his portmanteau for dear life among the jerks and jolts, till his ringers were numbed with cold and exposure.

They held out against it all, before the pelting rain, till man and beast were well-nigh exhausted. At last, about three-quarters of the way to Fauresmith, on the bleak bare hill-tops, sleety snow began to fall in big flakes, and the barking of a dog to be heard in the distance. The Boer driver pricked up his ears at the sound.

“That must a house be,” he remarked in his Dutch pigeon-English to Guy; and Guy felt in his soul that the most miserable and filthy of Kaffir huts would just then be a welcome sight t............