He turned up the brim of his great hat and looked at the moon, but most at
the leaves of the prickly pear that grew just before him. They glinted,
and glinted, and glinted, just like his own heart--cold, so hard, and very
wicked. His physical heart had pain also; it seemed full of little bits of
glass, that hurt. He had sat there for half an hour, and he dared not go
back to the close house.
He felt horribly lonely. There was not one thing so wicked as he in all
the world, and he knew it. He folded his arms and began to cry--not aloud;
he sobbed without making any sound, and his tears left scorched marks where
they fell. He could not pray; he had prayed night and day for so many
months; and tonight he could not pray. When he left off crying, he held
his aching head with his brown hands. If one might have gone up to him and
touched him kindly; poor, ugly little thing! Perhaps his heart was almost
broken.
With his swollen eyes he sat there on a flat stone at the very top of the
kopje; and the tree, with every one of its wicked leaves, blinked, and
blinked, and blinked at him. Presently he began to cry again, and then
stopped his crying to look at it. He was quiet for a long while, then he
knelt up slowly and bent forward. There was a secret he had carried in his
heart for a year. He had not dared to look at it; he had not whispered it
to himself, but for a year he had carried it.
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