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 uncle Han’s child, and her mother died when she was born!”

And Niccoline, putting down her work and looking out across the garden, answered: “She is not my uncle Hans’s child. My uncle Hans | had no child. She is Paul Marais’s child. Wait! I will now tell you!”

And here is what she told me.

When my father was the pastor of Platkops dorp, and I was still a young girl, Paul Marais came down from the Caroline district to farm with old Jan Cloete on the Ghamka river. My father, who had also come from the Caroline district, knew the parents of Paul Marais, and when he came to the dorp the young man would come to see my father at the parsonage. The first time that he came Jan Cloete brought him. Jan Cloete talked with my parents, and I remember yet how his beard waggled, and Paul Marais talked with me. He told me that day that his grandmother had been an Englishwoman. He was very proud of this and made me talk Eng-