CHAPTER 2.XI.An Unfinished Letter.
Gregory Rose had been gone seven months.

Em sat alone on a white sheepskin before the fire.
The August night-wind, weird and shrill, howled round the chimneys and through the crannies, and in walls and doors, and uttered a long low cry as it forced its way among the clefts of the stones on the kopje.

It was a wild night.

The prickly-pear tree, stiff and upright as it held its arms, felt the wind's might, and knocked its flat leaves heavily together, till great branches broke off.

The Kaffers, as they slept in their straw huts, whispered one to another that before morning there would not be an armful of thatch left on the roofs; and the beams of the wagon-house creaked and groaned as if it were heavy work to resist the importunity of the wind.
Em had not gone to bed.