The farmer and his wife were Boers, but they spoke English. Mr. Jan
Willem Klaas himself was a fine specimen of the breed--tall, erect,
broad-shouldered, and genial. Mrs. Klaas, his wife, was mainly
suggestive, in mind and person, of suet-pudding. There was one prattling
little girl of three years old, by name Sannie, a most engaging child;
and also a chubby baby.
"You are betrothed, of course?" Mrs. Klaas said to Hilda before me,
with the curious tactlessness of her race, when we made our first
arrangement.
Hilda's face flushed. "No; we are nothing to one another," she
answered--which was only true formally. "Dr. Cumberledge had a post at
the same hospital in London where I was a nurse; and he thought he would
like to try Rhodesia. That is all."
Mrs. Klaas gazed from one to other of us suspiciously. "You English are
strange!" she answered, with a complacent little shrug. "But there--from
Europe! Your ways, we know, are different."
Hilda did not attempt to explain. It would have been impossible to make
the good soul understand. Her horizon was so simple. She was a harmless
housewife, given mostly to dyspepsia and the care of her little ones.
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