Each family sat in its house, at a little distance from
each front door, watching with anxious fascination
the goings and the comings of the white people stand-
ing in front of the big house.

Then the white predikant came from Poort, you
could tell him by the black hat and the black clothes.
He shook hands with Big Baas Flip's sons, and said
words of comfort to them. Then all the men followed
him into the house, and after a while the sound of the
slow determined singing was carried across the valley,
to the small stone houses on the other side, to Enoch
Maarman, head-shepherd of Kroon, and his wife
Sara, sitting just inside the door of their own house.
Maarman's anxiety showed itself in the movements of
his face and hands, and his wife knew of his condition
but kept her face averted from it. Guilt lay heavily
upon them both, because they had hated Big Baas Flip,
not with clenched fists and bared teeth, but, as be-
fitted people in their station, with salutes and defer-
ence.

Sara suddenly sat erect.

--They are coming, she said.

They watched the four men leave the big stone
house and take the path that led to the small stone
houses, and both could feel the fear rising in them.
Their guilt weighed down on them all the more
heavily because they felt no grief. They felt all the
more afraid because the show of grief might have
softened the harshness of the approaching ordeal.
Someone must pay for so terrible a crime, and if not
the one who did it, then who better than the one who
could not grieve. That morning Maarman had stood

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