"Surely you have ill treated an old man enough." Nobody stirred, not even Frank Muller, who was gazing at her tear-stained face with a fierce smile playing round the corners of his clean-cut mouth, which his beard was trimmed to show.
"It will pass, Miss Bessie," he said; "it will pass.

I have often seen such fits.

They come from too much excitement, or too much drink----" Suddenly he broke off with an exclamation, and pointed to the house, from the roof of which pale curls of blue smoke were rising.
"Who has fired the house ?" he shouted.

"By Heaven! I will shoot the man." The Boers wheeled round staring in astonishment, and as they gazed the tinderlike roof burst into a red sheet of flame that grew and gathered breadth and height with an almost marvellous rapidity.

Just then, too, a light breeze sprang up from over the hill at the rear of the house, as it sometimes did at this time of the day, and bent the flames over towards them in an immense arch of fire, so that the fumes and heat and smoke began to beat upon their faces.
"Oh, the house is burning down!" cried Bessie, utterly bewildered by this new misfortune.
"Here, you!" shouted Muller to the gaping Boers, "go and see if anything can be saved.