I, too, kissed Marie, and, tumbling on to my horse somehow, rode away, my eyes blind with tears, for this parting was bitter.

When I could see clearly again I pulled up and looked back at the camp, which was now at some distance.

It seemed a peaceful place indeed, for although the storm of the morning was returning and a pall of dark cloud hung over it, the sun still shone upon the white wagon caps and the people who went to and fro among them.
Who could have thought that within a little time it would be but a field of blood, that those wagons would be riddled with assegais, and that the women and children who were moving there must most of them lie upon the veld mutilated corpses dreadful to behold?
Alas! the Boers, always impatient of authority and confident that their own individual judgment was the best, did not obey their commandant's order to keep together.
They went off this way and that, to shoot the game which was then so plentiful, leaving their families almost without protection.

Thus the Zulus found and slew them.
Presently as I rode forward a little apart from the others someone overtook me, and I saw that it was Henri Marais.
"Well, Allan," he said, "so God has given you to me for a son-in-law.
Who would have thought it?
You do not look to me like a new-married man, for that marriage is not natural when the bridegroom rides off and leaves the bride of an hour.

Perhaps you will never be really married after all, for God, Who gives sons-in-law, can also take them away, especially when He was not asked for them.