The drawing was placed carefully between two sheets of corrugated cardboard and sent off, registered post, to the Museum. Then there was a silence for five weeks, during which time everybody forgot about the competition. Only when the letter came to the Principal, and he, beaming, read it out to Precious, were they reminded.

"You have won first prize," he said. "You are to go to Gaborone, with your teacher and myself, and your father, to get the prize from the Minister of Education at a special ceremony."

It was too much for her, and she wept, but soon stopped, and was allowed to leave school early to run back to give the news to her Daddy.

They travelled down with the Principal in his truck, arriving far too early for the ceremony, and spent several hours sitting in the Museum yard, waiting for the doors to open. But at last they did, and others came, teachers, people from the newspapers, members of the Legislature. Then the Minister arrived in a black car and people put down their glasses of orange juice and swallowed the last of their sandwiches.

She saw her painting hanging in a special place, on a room divider, and there was a small card pinned underneath it. She went with her teacher to look at it, and she saw, with leaping heart, her name neatly typed out underneath the picture: PRECIOUS RAMOTSWE (10) (MOCHUDI GOVERNMENT JUNIOR SCHOOL). And underneath that, also typed, the title which the Museum itself had provided: Cattle Beside Dam.

She stood rigid, suddenly appalled. This was not true. The picture was of goats, but they had thought it was cattle! She was getting a prize for a cattle picture, by false pretences.

"What is wrong?" asked her father. "You must be very pleased. Why are you looking so sad?"

She could not say anything. She was about to become a criminal, a perpetrator of fraud. She could not possibly take a prize for a cattle picture when she simply did not deserve that.

But now the Minister was standing beside her, and he was preparing to make a speech. She looked up at him, and he smiled warmly.

"You are a very good artist," he said. "Mochudi must be proud of you."

She looked at the toes of her shoes. She would have to confess.

"It is not a picture of cattle," she said. "It is a picture of goats. You cannot give me a prize for a mistake."

The Minister frowned, and looked at the label. Then he turned back to her and said: "They are the ones who have made a mistake. I also think those are goats. I do not think they are cattle."

He cleared his throat and the Director of the Museum asked for silence.

"This excellent picture of goats," said the Minister, "shows how talented are our young people in this country. This young lady will grow up to be a fine citizen and maybe a famous artist. She deserves her prize, and I am now giving it to her."

She took the wrapped parcel which he gave her, and felt his hand upon her shoulder, and heard him whisper: "You are the most truthful child I have met. Well done."

Then the ceremony was over, and a little later they returned to Mochudi in the Principal's bumpy truck, a heroine returning, a bearer of prizes.

AT THE age of sixteen, Mma Ramotswe left school ("The best girl in this school," pronounced the Principal. "One of the best girls in Botswana.") Her father had wanted her to stay on, to do her Cambridge School Certificate, and to go even beyond that, but Mma Ramotswe was bored with Mochudi. She was bored, too, with working in the Upright Small General Dealer, where every Saturday she did the stocktaking and spent hours ticking off items on dog-eared stock lists. She wanted to go somewhere. She wanted her life to start.

"You can go to my cousin," her father said. "That is a very different place. I think that you will find lots of things happening in that house."

It cost him a great deal of pain to say this. He wanted her to stay, to look after him, but he knew that it would be selfish to expect her life to revolve around his. She wanted freedom; she wanted to feel that she was doing something with her life. Andof course, at the back of his mind, was the thought of marriage. In a very short time, he knew, there would be men wanting to marry her.

He would never deny her that, of course. But what if the man who wanted to marry her was a bully, or a drunkard, or a womaniser? All of this was possible; there was any number of men like that, waiting for an attractive girl that they could latch on to and whose life they could slowly destroy. These men were like leeches; they sucked away at the goodness of a woman's heart until it was dry and all her love had been used up. That took a long time, he knew, because women seemed to have vast reservoirs of goodness in them.

If one of these men claimed Precious, then what could he, a father, do? He could warn her of the risk, but whoever listened to warnings about somebody they loved? He had seen it so often before; love was a form of blindness that closed the eyes to the most glaring faults. You could love a murderer, and simply not believe that your lover would do so much as crush a tick, let alone kill somebody. There would be no point trying to dissuade her.

The cousin's house would be as safe as anywhere, even if it could not protect her from men. At least the cousin could keep an eye on her niece, and her husband might be able to chase the most unsuitable men away. He was a rich man now, with more than five buses, and he would have that authority that rich men had. He might be able to send some of the young men packing.

THE COUSIN was pleased to have Precious in the house. She decorated a room for her, hanging new curtains of a thick yellow material which she had bought from the OK Bazaars on a shopping trip to Johannesburg. Then she filled a chest of drawers with clothes and put on top of it a framed picture of the Pope. The floor was covered with a simply patterned reed mat. It was a bright, comfortable room.

Precious settled quickly into a new routine. She was given a job in the office of the bus company, where she added invoices and checked the figures in the drivers' records. She was quick at this, and the cousin's husband noticed that she was doing as much work as the two older clerks put together. They sat at their tables and gossiped away the day, occasionally moving invoices about the desk, occasionally getting up to put on the kettle.

It was easy for Precious, with her memory, to remember how to do new things and to apply the knowledge faultlessly. She was also willing to make suggestions, and scarcely a week went past in which she failed to make some suggestion as to how the office could be more efficient.

"You're working too hard," one of the clerks said to her. "You're trying to take our jobs."

Precious looked at them blankly. She had always worked as hard as she could, at everything she did, and she simply did not understand how anybody could do otherwise. How could they sit there, as they did, and stare into the space in front of their desks when they could be adding up figures or checking the drivers' returns?

She did her own checking, often unasked, and although everything usually added up, now and then she found a small discrepancy. These came from the giving of incorrect change, the cousin explained. It was easy enough to do on a crowded bus, and as long as it was not too significant, they just ignoredit. But Precious found more than this. She found a discrepancy of slightly over two thousand pula in the fuel bills invoices and she drew this to the attention of her cousin's husband.

"Are you sure?" he asked. "How could two thousand pula go missing?"