"They got a bit suspicious when we steamed orf," said the guard; "more than a bit suspicious, they did."

"They took the thrucks for the Armoured Thrain," recounted Kildare, with a radiant smile illuminating a countenance of surpassing griminess, "an' they rode to widin range, an' got off their hairies, an' dhropped in a volley just to insinse them they took to be squattin' down inside them insijious divizes, into what they would be gettin' if they put up the heads av them." He mopped his brimming eyes with a handful of cotton waste, not innocent of lubricating fluid. "Tower av Ivory! 'twas grand to see the contimpt av thim when the cowards widin did not reply. 'Donder!' says the gaffer in the tay-thray hat and the beard like the grandfather av all the billygoats. 'Is this,' he says, 'the British pluck they talk about? Show thim verdant English a Dutchman behind a geweer,' he says, an' that's what they call a gun in their dirty lingo—'an' they lie down wid all four legs in the air like a puppy that sees the whip. Plug thim again, my sons,' says he, 'an' wid the blessin' av Heaven, we'll stiffen the lot!'"

"You could never hear him, so you could not, not at all that distance," the Cardiff stoker objected.

"Could I not see him, ye blind harper, swearin' in dumb show, an' urgin' thim to shoot sthraight for the honour av the Republics an' give the rooi batchers Jimmy O! Ga-lant-ly they respondid, battherin' the sides av the mysterious locomotive containin' the bloody an' rapacious soldiery av threacherous England wid nickel-plated Mauser bullets, ontil she hiccoughs indacintly, an' wid a bellow to bate St. Fin Barr's bull, kicks herself to pieces!"

"She did so, surely," affirmed the Cardiff stoker. "Surely she did so."

"Tell the Colonel 'ow the engine jumped right off the metals," advised the guard.

"Clane she did," went on Kildare jubilantly, "an' rattled Davis an' me inside the cab like pays in an iron pod. See the funny-bone I sthripped agin' the side av her!" He exhibited a raw elbow for the inspection of the Chief. "An' when Davis gets the betther av the rest av the black that's on him wid soft soap an' hot wather, there's an oi he'll not wash off."

"The brake-handle did that, it did so," said Davis, touching the optic tenderly. But Kildare was answering a question of the Chiefs.

"Killed! Wisha, yarra! av I'd left a dozen an twenty to the back av that sthretched on the bog behind me, it's a glad man I'd be to have it to tell ye, sorr. But barrin' they wor' blown to smithereens entirely, not a livin' man or horse av thim did I see dead at all, at all. But the Sergeant an' the Reconnoithrin' Party will asy know the place—asy—by the thundherin' big hole that's knocked in the permanent way there, sizable enough to bury...." He paused, for once at a loss.

"Korah, Dathan, and Abiram," suggested Davis, who, as a Bible Baptist, had a fund of Scripture knowledge upon which he occasionally drew, "with their families and their pavilions and all their substance...."

"Av Cora was there," said Kildare, "she was disguised as a Dutchman, for sorrow an' oi I clapped on any human baste that was not a square-buttocked Boer in tan-cord throusers. Thank you, sorr, your Honour, an' good luck to yourself an' all av us! An' we'll dhrink your Honour's health wid it."

"We will so!" agreed Davis, as the sovereign, dropped into his own twice-greased palm, vanished in the recesses of his black and oleaginous overalls.

"Thankee, sir. You're a gentleman, sir!" the guard acknowledged, touching his cap and concealing the gold coin slid into his own ready hand with professional celerity.

"Begob! an' you might have tould the Colonel somethin' that was news," commented Kildare, as the tall, active figure stepped lightly over the metals and passed up the ramp, and 123 trundled on, and backed into the engine-shed amidst a salvo of cheers and hand-clapping.



The Colonel whistled his pleasant little tune quite through as, the Reconnoitring Party despatched to the scene of the explosion, he went contentedly back to luncheon at Nixey's. True, Kildare had said, and as the Sergeant in command regretfully testified later, said correctly, that neither Boer nor beast had been put out of action by the flying debris. A poor reprisal had been made, in the opinion of some malcontents, for the act of War committed by the forces of the Republics in crossing the Border, in cutting the telegraph lines, and destroying the railway-bridge. But the moral result was anything but trifling, in its effect upon the Boer mind. The "new square gun" became a proverb of dread, inspiring a salutary fear of more traps of the same kind, "set by that slim duyvel, the English Commandant," and threw over the innocent stretch of veld outside those trivial sand-bagged defences the glamour of the Mysterious and the Unknown. No solid Dutchman welcomed the idea of soaring skywards in a multitude of infinitesimal fragments, in company with other Free Staters or sons of the Transvaal Republic similarly reduced.

No more boasts on the part of Brounckers, General in command of those massed, menacing, united laagers on the Border, seven miles from Gueldersdorp as the crow flew. No more imaginative promises with reference to the taking of the small, defiant hamlet before breakfast, wiping out the garrison to a rooinek, and starting on the homeward march refreshed with coffee and biltong, and driving the towns-people before them as prisoners of War. The desperate perils presented by the conjectural and largely non-existent mine were thenceforth to loom largely and luridly in the telegrams that went up to Pretoria.

"There's a lot in bluff, you know," that "slim duyvel," the Commandant of the rooineks, said long afterwards. "And we bluffed about the Mines, real and dummy, for all we were worth!"

So, possibly with premonition of the telegram that was even then clicking out its message at Pretoria, there was a note of satisfaction in his whistle out of keeping with the execution actually done, as Nixey's Hotel came in sight with the Union Jack floating over it, denoting that all was well. That flagstaff, with its changing signals, was to dominate the popular pulse ere long. But in these days it merely denoted Staff Quarters, and War, with its grim accompanying horrors, seemed a long way off.

A white-gowned European nursemaid on the opposite street-corner waved and shrieked to her deserting elder charges, and the Chief's quick eye noted that the small, sunburned, active, bare legs of the boy and girl in cool sailor-suits of blue-and-white linen twill, were scampering in his direction. He knew his fascination for children, and instinctively slackened his stride as they came up, abreast now, and shyly hand in hand:

"Mister Colonel ...?" The speaker touched the expansive brim of a straw sailor hat with a fine assumption of adult coolness.

"Quite right, and who are you?"

The small boy hesitated, plainly at a nonplus. The round-eyed girl tugged at the boy's sailor jumper, whispering:

"I saided he wouldn't know you!"

"I fought he would. Because Mummy said he wemembered our names ve uvver night at ve Hotel ... when he promised ... about ve animals from Wodesia ... all made of mud, an' feavers, and bits of fur ..."

Memory gave up the missing names, helped by those boyish replicas of the candid clear grey eyes of the Mayor's wife, shining under the drooping plume of fair hair.

"Mummy was quite right, Hammy, and Berta was wrong, because I remember your names quite well, you see. And the birds and beasts and insects are in a box at my quarters. Come and get them."

"If Anne doesn't kick up a wow?" hesitated Hammy, his small brown hand already in the larger one.

"We'll arrange it with Anne." He waited for the arrival of the white-canopied perambulator and its fluttering-ribboned guardian to say, with a tone and smile that won her instant suffrages: "I'm going to borrow these children for a minute or so. Will you come into the shade and rest? I promise not to keep you long."

Beauvayse and Lady Hannah's Captain Bingo, relieved from lookout duty, and descending in quest of food from the Chief's particular eyrie on the roof of Nixey's Hotel, heard shrieks of infant laughter coming from the coffee-room. Knives, forks, and glasses had been ruthlessly swept from the upper end of one of the tables laid for the Staff luncheon, and across the fair expanse of linen, pounded into whiteness and occasional holes by the vigorous thumpers of the Kaffir laundry-women, meandered a marvellous procession of quagga and koodoo, rhino and hartebeest, lion and giraffe, ostrich and elephant, modelled by the skilful hands of Matabele toy-makers. Tarantula, with wicked bright eyes of shining berries, brought up the rear, with the bee, and the mole-cricket, and, with bulgy brown, white-striped body and long wings importantly crossed behind its back, a tsetse of appallingly gigantic size....

"Oh, fank you, Mister Colonel," Hammy was saying, with shining eyes of rapture fixed upon the glorious ones; "and is they weally my own, my vewy own, for good?"

"Yours and Berta's, really and for good."

"And won't you"—Hammy's magnificent effort at disinterestedness brought the tears into his eyes—"won't you want vem to play wif, ever yourself?"

The deft hands swept the birds and beasts, with tarantula and tsetse, into the wooden box, and lifted the children from their chairs, as Captain Bingo and Beauvayse, following the D.A.A.G., came in, brimming with various versions of what had happened out there on the veld....

"I have other things to play with just now, Hammy. Run along with Berta now. You'll find your nurse in the hall."

Berta put up her face confidently to be kissed. Hammy, in manly fashion, offered a hand—the left—the right arm being occupied with the box of toys. As Berta's little legs scampered through the door, he delayed to ask:

"What are your playfings, Mister Colonel?"

"Live men and big guns, just now, Hammy; and chances and issues, and results and risks."

The plume of fair hair fell back, clearing the candid grey eyes as Hammy lifted up his face, confidently lisping:

"I don't quite fink I know what wesults and wisks are, but I'd like to play wif the live men an' the big guns too sometimes ... if you didn't want vem always?"

"We'll see about it, Hammy, when you're grown up."

"Good-bye, Mister Colonel. And I would lend you my beasts an' fings, because I know you wouldn't bweak them?"

"See that Berta has her share in them meanwhile. Off with you, now!"

Later, in the seclusion of the connubial bedchamber, said Captain Bingo, dressing for dinner, the last time for many months, as it was to prove:

"What do you suppose was the Chief's next move, after the engine and tender got in, and the crowd hoorayed him back from the Railway Works? No use your guessin', though. Even a woman wouldn't have expected to find him playin' Noah's Ark in the coffee-room with the Mayor's two kids!"

"I like that!" said Lady Hannah meditatively, arranging the Pompadour transformation, not apparently the worse for the candle-accident of the previous night.

"Because you're a woman and sentimental," said her spouse, wrestling with a cuff-link.

"No; because I am a woman whose instinct tells her that nothing will seem too big for a man for whom nothing is too small. And—what an incident for a paragraph!"

He grinned: "With headin's in thunderin' big capitals.... 'The Soldier Hero Sports With A Babbling Babe.... The Defender Of British Prestige At Gueldersdorp Puts In Half an Hour At Cat's-Cradle Ere The Armoured Train Toddles Out With The B.S.A.P. To Give Beans To The Blooming Boer!'"

She darted at him, caught him by the lapels ... made him look at her.

"It's true? You really mean it? The ball begins?"

"Upon the honour of a henpecked husband—before daybreak to-morrow, you'll hear the music."

She sparkled with delight.

"Oh, poor, unlucky, humdrum women at home in England, walking with the shooters, or lolling in hammocks under trees, and trying to flirt with fat City financiers or vapid young attaches of Legation! I shall take the Irish mare, and borrow an orderly, and ride out to see a Real Action!"

His round pink face grew long. "The devil you will!"

"The devil I won't, you mean. Why, for what else under the sky did I come out here but the glorious chance of War?" Her impatient foot tapped the floor. He recognised the warning of domestic battle, glowered, and gave in.

"Well, if you get chipped, don't blame me. There's about as much cover on a baccarat-table as you'll find on that small-bush veld."

"All the better for seeing things, my dear!" She gave him a radiant glance over her shoulder as she snapped her diamond necklace.

"You'll see things you won't enjoy. Mind that. Unless the whole affair ends in sheer fizzle."

"I'll pray that it mayn't!"

"I'd pray to have you much more like the ordinary woman who funks raw-head-and-bloody-bones if I thought it would be any good!"

"My poor old boy, it's thirty years too late. You ought to have begun while I was crying in the cradle. And—I was under the impression that you married me because you found me different from the ruck. And besides—think of my paper!"

"Damn the rag! I think of my wife!"

She swept him a curtsy:

"Cela va sans dire!"

"And how a woman of your birth and breedin' can dream of nothin' else but doin' somethin' that'll make you notorious—set the smart crowd gabblin' and gapin' and crushin' to stare—is more than I can understand!"

She flashed round upon him. "You have the wrong word! Notoriety—any social divorcee or big-hatted music-hall high-kicker can have that—if only they've kicked high enough! Popularity is what I'd have if I could—and only the People can give it—as Brutus and Cromwell and Napoleon knew!"

He admitted that those old Roman johnnies who jawed in the Forum knew what they were about, but added that the Puritan chap with the wart on his nose was a thundering old humbug, ending triumphantly: "And we whacked old Bony at Waterloo! And—suppose you stop a Boer bullet and get knocked out—where do I come in?"

She jangled out her shrillest laugh. "Behind the coffin as Chief Mourner, I suppose. And you'll tack on the orthodox black sleeve-band, and look out for Number Two. And choose the ordinary kind, who funks raw-head and all the rest of it, for the next venture. But I prophesy you'll be bored. It's settled about Sheila and the orderly?"

He nodded.

"Righto! but there'll be two troopers, not one. And you'll be under the Corporal's orders about range, and distance, and keepin' out of the hands of—the other side. You don't absolutely yearn to be killed or taken prisoner, I suppose?"

Her heart beat high at the latter-named eventuality. She saw London rushing to read of the thrilling seizure and the yet more thrilling escape of the Lady War Correspondent attached to H.I.M. forces on the Frontier:

Who got clean away, mind you, with complete information of the strategic plans of the General in command of the enemy's laagers, sewn inside her corsets or hidden in her shoes!

Bingo little dreamed of the definite plan seething under his little wife's transformation coiffure. It had matured since her meeting on the railway-journey from Cape Town with an interesting personality. A big, brown-bearded Johannesburger, with light queer eyes, who had been reticent at first, but more interesting after his confidence had been gained.

Van Busch he had named himself. Of the British South African War Intelligence Bureau. That man knew how to value women. And he had proved them at what he called the risky game.

"With nerve and josh like yours, and plenty of money for palm-oil ..." Van Busch had said, and winked, signifying that there were no lengths to which a woman of Lady Hannah Wrynche's capabilities might not go. And he had slipped into her hand a card scrawled with an address where he might be got at in case ...

The pencilled oblong of soiled pasteboard was yet in a secret compartment of her handbag. By letter addressed care of W. Bough, Transport Agent and Stock-dealer, Van Busch was to be communicated with at a farmstead some thirty miles north.

The spice of adventure her palate craved could be had by corresponding with Van Busch through the man Bough. After that—— Well! She had her plan ...

She tied her husband's white tie, took him by the ears, kissed him warmly on each side of his large pink face, glowing with blushes evoked by her unwonted display of affection, and led him away to dinner, her mental vision seeing prophetic broadsheets papering the kerbs of Piccadilly, the ears of her imagination making celestial melody of those raucous yells:

"Speshul Edition! Hextry Speshul Edition! 'Ere y'are, sir; on'y a 'a'penny. SPESHUL!"



XXVII

For nearly two months, from dawn until dark, Gueldersdorp had squatted on her low-topped hill in a screaming blizzard of shrapnel and Mauser bullets. Never a town of imposing size or stately architecture, see her now a battered hamlet of gaping walls, and shattered roofs, and wrecked chimneys; staring defiance through glassless windows like the blind eyeholes in the mouldered House that once has held the living thought of Man. From dawn until dark the ancient seven-pounders of her batteries had banged and grumbled, her Maxims had rattled defiance from Kopje Fort, and the Nordenfelt released its showers of effective, death-dealing little projectiles. Scant news from outside trickled into the town. Grumer, with his Brigade, was guarding the Drifts, and when the Relief might be expected was now a moss-grown topic of general conversation in Gueldersdorp.

And within her girdle of trenches, stern, grimy, haggard men lived, cheek to the heated rifle-breech, and ate, and snatched brief spells of sleep, booted and bandoliered, and with the loaded weapon ready for gripping. Since the attack on Maxim Kopje had choked the Hospital with wounded men and dotted the Cemetery with little white crosses, nothing of much note had occurred. The armoured train had done good service, and the Baraland Rifle Volunteers had carried out their surprise against the enemy's western camp one fine dark night, helped by a squadron of the Irregulars, with eleven wounded, and the loss of six out of fifty fighting-men.

The Convent of the Holy Way stood empty and deserted in its shrapnel-littered garden-enclosure.

From east, west, north, and south the deadly iron messengers had come, making sore havoc of this poor house of Christ. "When the walls fall about our ears, Colonel," the Mother-Superior had declared, "it will be time to leave them." They were lacework now, with a confusion of bare rafters overhead, over which streamed, as if in mockery, the Red-Cross Flag. Grim figures, like geometrical problems gone mad, were made by water and gas pipes torn from their bedding, and twisted as if by the hands of giants in cruel play. The little iron bedsteads of the Sisters, and the holy symbols over them, were the only articles missing from the cells, revealed in section by the huge gaps in the masonry.

The Tabernacle of the chapel altar, void of the Unspeakable Mystery it had housed, fluttered its rearward curtains through the wreckage of the east wall and the cheap little stained-glass window, where the Shepherds and the Magi had bowed before the Virgin Mother and the Divine Child. Within sight of their ruined home, the Sisterhood had found refuge. An underground dwelling had been dug for them in the garden before an abandoned soft-brick-and-corrugated-iron house, formerly inhabited by one of the head officials of the railway, a personage of Dutch extraction and Boer sympathies, at present sequestered beneath the yellow flag of the town gaol for their too incautious manifestation; while his wife and young family were inhabitants of the Women's Laager. And from their subterranean burrow the Sisters carried on their work of mercy as cheerfully as though their Order had been originally one of Troglodytes, nursing the sick and wounded, cooking and washing for the convalescents, comforting the bereaved, and tending the many orphans of the siege.

South lay the laager of the Refugees. To the westward within the ring of trenches and about a mile and a half from the town, was the Women's Laager, visited not seldom by the enemy's shell-fire, in spite of the Red-Cross Flag. Fever and rheumatism, pneumonia and diphtheria stalked among the dwellers in these tainted burrows, claiming their human toll. Women languished and little children pined and withered, dying for lack of exercise and fresh air, with the free veld spreading away on all sides to the horizon, and the burning blue South African sky overhead. Famine had not yet appeared among the Europeans, though grisly black spectres in Kaffir blankets haunted the refuse-heaps, and fought with gaunt dogs for picked bones and empty meat-tins, and were found dead not unseldom, after full meals of strange and dreadful things. Fresh meat was still to be had, though the cattle and sheep of the Barala had been thinned by raids on the part of the enemy, and poor grazing. Shell and rifle-fire not infrequently spared the butcher trouble, so that your joints were sometimes weirdly shaped. But they were joints, and there was plenty of the preserved article in Kriel's Warehouse and at the Army Service Stores. Tea and coffee were becoming rare and precious, the sparkling draught of lager was to be had only in remembrance; the aromatic beer was all drunk up, and the stone-ginger was three shillings a bottle. Whisky was to be had at the price of liquid gold, brandy was treasured above rubies, and served out sparingly by the Hand of Authority, as medicine in urgent cases.

You could get vegetables from the Chinaman, who continued to cultivate onions, cabbages, potatoes, and melons in the market-gardens about the town, imperturbable under shot and shell, his large straw hat affording an admirable target from the Boer sniper's point of view, as metaphorically he gathered his fat harvest of dollars from the soil. What you could not get for any amount of dollars was peace and rest, clean air, and space to stretch your cramped-up limbs in, until Sunday came, bringing the Truce of God for Englishman and Transvaaler.

The Hospital, like each of the smaller hospitals that had sprung from the parent stalk, was crowded. The operating theatre had been turned into a ward where the lane between the beds just gave room for a surgeon or a nurse to pass, and hourly the cry went up: "Room, more room for the wounded and the sick!" And among these Saxham worked, night and day, like a man upheld by forces superhuman.

"By-and-by," he would say impatiently, when they urged him to take rest, and would bend his black brows, and hunch those great shoulders of his to the work again.

"Ye have a demon, man," said Taggart, Major of the R.A.M.C., himself a haggard-eyed but tireless labourer in the red fields of pain. "At three o' the smalls ye got to your bed, and at six ye made the rounds, at seven ye were dealing with a select batch o' shell-fire an' rifle-shot casualties—our friends outside being a gey sicht better marksmen when refreshed by a guid nicht's sleep; at eight ye had had your bit o' breakfast, and got doon your gun an' gane oot for an hour o' calm, invigorating sniping on the veld before returning punctually at ten o' the clock to attack the business o' the day, wi' a bag o' twa Boers to your creedit."

"I only got one, Major. The other chap hobbled down bandaged, upon crutches, to-day, and had a pot-shot at me as I lay doggo behind my particular stone. I put up my hat on a stick, and—see!" Saxham gravely exhibited a felt Service smasher with a clean hole through it, an inch above the lining-edge. "He's a snowy-locked, hoary-bearded, Father Noah-hatted patriarch of seventy at least, and very proud of his shooting, and I've let him think he got me this time, just to make him happy for one night. To-morrow he is to make the painful discovery that I am still in the flesh."

"Aweel, aweel! But I would point out to ye that Fortune is a fickle, tricksy jade, and the luck o' the game might fall to your patriarch in the antediluvian headgear to-morrow."

Then the luck of the game, thought the hearer, deep in that wounded heart of his, would not only be with the patriarch. And the great puzzle, Life, would be solved for good.

Taggart had said he, Saxham, had a demon. He could have answered that only by hard, unceasing, unremitting work, or, when no more work was there to do, by the fierce excitement of those grilling hours spent lying behind the stone, was the demon to be kept out. Of all things he dreaded inactivity, and though he would drop upon his cot in the tiny bedroom that had been a Hospital ward-pantry, and sleep the heavy sleep of weariness the moment his head touched the pillow, yet he would start awake after an hour or two, parched with that savage, unquenched thirst, and drink great draughts of the brackish well-water, boiled for precaution's sake, and tramp the confined space until the grip of desire grew slack. But he had never once yielded since the night when a man with the eye and voice of a leader among men had come to the house in Harris Street and taken him by the hand.

Do you say impossible, that the man in whom the habit of vice had formed should be able to cast off his degrading weakness, like a shameful garment, by sheer force of will, and be sane and strong and masterful again? I say, possible with this man. You see him plucked from the slough by the strong hand of manly fellowship, and nerved and strengthened, if only for a little while, to play the game for the sake of that other's belief in him. Such influence have such men among their fellows for good or for ill.

You can see the Dop Doctor upon this brilliant November morning mounting a charger lent him by his friend, a handsome Waler full of mettle and spirit—oats not being yet required for the support of humans—and calling au revoir to Taggart as he rides away from the Hospital gates followed by an orderly of the R.A.M.C. in a spider, pulled by a wiry, shabby little Boer mare.

"The man rides like a fox-hunter," commented Taggart, noticing the ease of the seat, the light handling of the rein, the way in which the fidgety, spirited beast Saxham rode answered to the gentling hand and the guiding pressure of the rider's knee, as a sharp storm of rifle-fire swept from the enemy's northern trenches, and the Mauser bullets spurted sand between the wheels of the spider and under the horses' bellies.

Saxham spurred ahead, the spider following. The bullet-pierced, grey felt smasher hat, a manly and not unpicturesque headgear, sat on the man's close-cropped head with a soldierly air becoming to the square, opaque-skinned face that had power and strength and virility in every line of it. The blue eyes, under their black bar of meeting eyebrows, were clear now, and the short aquiline nose, rough-hewn but not coarse, and the grimly-tender mouth were no longer thickened and swollen and reddened by intemperance. The figure, perfect in its manliness, if marred by the too heavy muscular development of the throat and the slightly bowed shoulders, looked well in the jacket of Service khaki, the Bedford cords and puttees and spurred brown boots that had replaced the worn white drills, the blue shirt and shabby black kamarband and canvas shoes. Looking at Saxham, even with knowledge of his past, you could not have associated a personality so striking and distinguished, an individuality so original and so strong, with the idea of the tipsy wastrel, wallowing like a hog in self-chosen degradation.

The Mother-Superior, coming up the ladder leading out of her underground abode as the horseman and the attendant spider drew near, thought of Bartolomeo Colleoni, as you see him, last of the great Condottieri, in the bronze by great Verrochio at Venice to-day. In armour, complete in the embossed morion, one with the great Flemish war-horse, he sat to the sculptor, the baton of Captain-General, given him by the Doge of Venice, in the powerful hand that only a little while before aided his picked men of the infantry to pack and harden snow about the granite boulders of the mountains in the Val Seriana, and sent the giant snow-balls thundering down, crushing bloody lanes through the ranks of the Venetian cavalry massed in the narrow defile below, and striking chill terror to the hearts of Doge and Prince and Senate.

Only the baton was a well-worn staghorn-handled crop, Squire Saxham's gift, together with a hunter, to his boy Owen, at seventeen. It was one of the few relics of home that had stayed by Saxham during his wanderings.

He reined up now, saluting the Mother-Superior with marked respect.

"Good-morning, ma'am. All well with you and yours?"

She answered with unusual hesitation:

"All the Sisters are well, thank you. But—if you could spare me a minute, Dr. Saxham, there is a question I should like to ask."

"As many minutes as you wish, ma'am. It is not your day for the Hospital, I think?"

"Ah, no!" she said, with the velvety South of Ireland vowel-inflection. "We keep Wednesday for the Women's Laager, always. Many of them are so miserable, poor souls, about their husbands and sons and brothers who are in the trenches, or who have been killed, and then there are the children to be cared for and washed. Not only the siege orphans, but so many who have sick or neglectful mothers. It takes us the whole day once we get there."

Saxham dismounted as she stooped to seize the end of a blue cotton-covered washing-basket impelled from below by an ascending Sister. The spider pulled up under cover of the brick-and-corrugated-iron house vacated by the railway-official, as another short storm of riflery cracked and rattled among the eastern foothills, and a whistling hurry of the sharp-nosed little messengers of death passed through Gueldersdorp. Some of them hit and flattened on the gable of the railway-official's house, one went through the leathern splashboard of the spider. Saxham moved instinctively to place himself between the closely-standing group of nuns and possible danger.

"No, no!" they cried, as one woman, their placid, cheerful tones taking a shade of anxiety. "You must not do that!"

"I know you are all well-seasoned," he said, looking at them with the smile that made his stern face changed and gentle.

"I am not so sure. The bullets come in the usual way of things. We take our chance of them," the Mother-Superior answered. But she pressed her lips together and grew pale as a faint cry came up from the subterranean dwelling, roofed with sheets of corrugated iron laid upon steel rails, and made bombproof with bags of earth. And Saxham, looking at the fine face, with its worn lines of fatigue and over-exertion, and noting the deep shadowy caves that housed the great luminous grey eyes, said:

"I think we must have you take some rest, or I shall be having my best helper on my hands as a patient. And that won't do, you know."

"No, it would not do," she said, looking fully and seriously at him. "And therefore I think our Lord will not permit it. But if He should, be sure another will rise up to fill my place."

"Whoever your successor might be," said Saxham sincerely, "she would not fulfil my ideal of an absolutely efficient nurse, as you do. So from the personal, if not the altruistic point of view, let me beg you to be careful."

"I take all reasonable care," she told him. "It is true, the work has been heavy this week; but to-morrow is Sunday, and we shall rest all day and sleep at the Convent. Indeed, some of us have taken it in turn to be on guard there every night, or nothing would be left us."

"I understand."

He knew how prowlers and night-thieves made harvest in the darkness among the deserted dwellings since Police and Town Guardsmen had been requisitioned to man the trenches. She went on:

"The upper story of the house is sheer wreck, as you may see, but the ground-floor is quite habitable. So much so that if the shells did not strike the poor dear place so often, I should suggest your turning it into a Convalescent Home."

"We may have to try the plan yet," said Saxham. "The Railway Institute is frightfully overcrowded."

"And," she told him, "a shell struck there yesterday evening, and burst in the larger ward."

"I had not heard of it," he said. "Was anybody hurt?"

"No one, thank God! But the fire was difficult to put out, until one of the Sisters thought of sand."

"It was an incendiary shell?" Disgust and contempt swelled his deep-cut nostrils and flamed from his vivid blue eyes. "And yet these Kaiser's gunners, in their blue-and-white Death or Glory uniforms, can hardly pretend ignorance of the Geneva Convention. But—your question?"

"It is—Children!" She beckoned to the two nuns, who stood at a little distance apart holding the washing-basket between them. "I will ask you to go on slowly before me with the basket. I will overtake you when I have spoken to Dr. Saxham."

"Surely, Reverend Mother." One tall, pale, and thin, the other round and rosy, they were alike in the placid, cheerful serenity of their good eyes and readily smiling lips. "And won't we be after taking the bundle?"

"No, no! It is heavy, and I am as strong as both of you together."

"Very well, Reverend Mother."

They were obediently moving on.

"A moment." Saxham stopped them. "If you two ladies have no objection to a little crowding, the spider will hold both of you as well as the bundle and the basket of washing. At least, it looks like a basket of washing."

All three laughed as they accepted his offer, assuring him that his suspicions were correct. For neither Kaffir laundrywoman or Hindu dhobi would go down any more to the washing troughs by the river, for fear of crossing that Stygian flood of blackness rivalling their own, supposing, as Beauvayse once suggested, that there is a third-class ferry for niggers and persons of colour? And from the waterworks on the Eastern side of the town the supply had been cut off by the enemy, so that the taps of Gueldersdorp had ceased to yield.

Old wells and springs had been reopened, cleaned, and brought into use for drinking purposes, so that of a water-famine there could be no fear. But the element became expensive when retailed by the tin bucketful, a bath a rare luxury when the contents of the said bucket might be spilled or thrown away in the course of the gymnastics wherewith the sable or coffee-brown bearer sought to evade the travelling unexploded shell or the fan-shaped charge of shrapnel. Therefore, the Sisters had turned laundry-women. You could hear the sound of Sister Tobias's smoothing-iron coming up from below, thump-thumping on the blanketed board.

"And where do you think we get the water, now?" the rosy Sister, in process of being packed into the spider, leaned over the wheel to ask.

"Not from the Convent?" Saxham thought of the strip of veld between there and the Hospital, even more fraught with peril than the patch he had just traversed, or the distance yet to be covered between the Sisters' bombproof and the Women's Laager, where Death, with the red sickle in his fleshless hand, stalked openly from dawn to nightfall.

"From the Convent, carrying it across after dark. And no well there, either, that you'd get the fill of a teaspoon out of"—a "tayspoon" it was in the rosy Sister's Dublin brogue—"and yet there's water there."

"But how——" Saxham began. The Mother-Superior shook her head, and the rosy Sister was silent.

"There is no mystery about the water at all. It is very simple." Standing there with her head held high and the fine, free, graceful lines of her tall figure outlined by the heavy folds of the now worn and darned black habit, and her hands, still beautiful, though roughened by toil, calmly folded upon her scapular, she was as remarkable and noble a figure, it seemed to Saxham, as the golden sunlight could fall upon anywhere in the world. And besides, she was his right hand at the Hospital. A capable, watchful, untiring nurse—and beauty would have decked her in his surgeon's eyes if she had been physically ugly or deformed.

"There is no mystery whatever, only when the bombardment first began I thought of the waterworks, and that one of my first cares, supposing I had been General Brounckers"—she smiled slightly—"would have been to operate there. So I set the Sisters to work at filling every empty barrel and bucket and tub in the Convent with water from the taps. And as we happened to have plenty of empty barrels and tubs, why, there is water to be had there now, and will be for some time to come. Go now, my children."

The smiling Sisters waved their hands. The orderly saluted with his whip and drove on in obedience to Saxham's nod.

"Of course, the Sisters are aware," he said, meeting the Mother's grave glance, "that if it is quicker to drive, it is safer to walk?"

She nodded with the gay, sweet smile that had belonged to Lady Biddy.

"They know, of course. But danger is in the day's work. We do not seek it. We are prepared for it, and it comes and passes. If one day it does not pass without the cost of life, we are prepared for that, and God's Will is done always."

"You are very brave," he said. It was the first time in his life that he had used the phrase to any woman, and the words came out almost grudgingly.

"Oh no, not brave," she told him; "only obedient." Her veil fluttered in the hot November breeze that bore with it the heavy fetid taint from the overcrowded trenches that ringed Gueldersdorp, and the acrid fumes of the cordite; though the air up here on the veld was sweet compared with the befouled atmosphere of the Women's Laager and the crowded wards at the Hospital, in spite of all that disinfectants could do. She went on:

"And we are very grateful to you for the lift. Sister Ruperta was on duty last night, and Sister Hilda Antony—the rosy Sister—is not as well as she would have us believe. Ah——"

With her grave eyes screened by her lifted hand, she had been watching the progress of the spider westward over the dun-yellow veld. Now the long wailing notes of the headquarter bugle sounded, in slow time, the Assembly, and in the same instant, from the Staff over the Colonel's hotel, where the red lamp signalled danger by night and the Red Flag gave its warning by day, the scarlet danger-signal fluttered in the breeze. Once, twice, again, the deep bell of the Catholic Church tolled. A dozen other bells echoed the warning, signifying danger by the number of their iron-tongue strokes to the threatened quarter of the town.

"'Ware big gun!" called the sentries. "West quarter, 'ware!"

The Mother-Superior grew pale, for the Women's Laager, towards which the little Boer mare was steadily trotting with the laden spider, lay in the menaced quarter, with a bare stretch of veld between it and the Camp of the Irregular Horse, whose white tents and dug-out shelters were pleasantly shaded by ancient blue gums, picturesque and stately in spite of broken boughs and foliage torn by shrapnel and seared by the chemical fumes of bursting charges innumerable.

"Will you not go down?" Saxham asked her.

She shook her head in reply, and stood with a waiting face in prayerful silence, not stirring save to make the Sign of the Cross. And as the long white fingers fluttered over the bosom of the black habit, the faint cry that Saxham's quick ear had heard before floated up from the populous depths below.

"What is that?"

Before the question had left Saxham's lips, the monster gun spoke out in deafening thunder from the enemy's position at East Point, nearly two miles away. The heavy grey smoke-pillar of the driving-charge towered against the sunbright distance, and simultaneously with the crack of the discharge, sounding as though all the pent-up forces of Hell had burst the brazen gates of Terror, and rushed forth to annihilate and destroy, the ninety-four pound projectile passed overhead, sweeping half the corrugated-iron roof from the railway-official's late dwelling with a fiendish clatter and din, as it passed harmlessly over the Women's Laager, and, wrecking a sentry's shelter on the western line of defences, burst harmlessly upon the veld beyond, blotting out the low hills behind a curtain of acrid green vapour.

"Get under cover, quick!" Saxham had shouted to his companion, as deafened by the tremendous concussion, and dazed and half-asphyxiated by the poisonous fumes, he strove for mastery with his maddened horse. This regained, he looked for the figure in the black habit and white coif, and knew a shock of horror in seeing it prone upon the ground.

"No, no, I am not hurt!" she cried, lightly rising as he hurried towards her. The tremendous air-concussion had thrown her down, and beyond a scratch upon her hand and some red dust on the black garments she was in nothing the worse.

"I don't know how I kept my own legs," Saxham said, laughing.

"It went by like twenty avalanches," she agreed. "And blessed be our Lord, excepting for the damage to the roof, no more seems to have been done. I can see the spider stopping near the Women's Laager." She peered out earnestly over the shimmering waste of dusty yellow-brown, and cried out joyfully: "Ah, Sister Hilda Antony and Sister Ruperta are getting out. All is well with them; all is well."

"But not with the washing."

Saxham had swung round his binoculars, and brought them to bear upon the vehicle and its late occupants. A grim smile played about his mouth as he handed her the glasses, and heard her cry of womanly distress as she beheld the fruit of late labour scattered on the veld and the Sisters' agonised activity displayed in the gathering up of sheets, pillow-slips, handkerchiefs, babies' shirts and petticoats, with other garments of a strictly feminine and private character. Her grave, discreet eyes avoided his as she handed back the binoculars, but a dimple showed near the edge of the white coif.

"And now," Saxham said, glancing at his watch, "may I know in what I can be of service?" It had seemed to him that the Mother-Superior hesitated to broach the subject. Nor had he been mistaken. The dimple vanished. Her calm eyes became troubled, and she asked, with a slight catching of the breath:

"Yes, there was something.... Doctor, is it possible for a person to die of fear?"

He answered promptly:

"In circumstances like the present? Certainly. Undoubtedly possible. I have seen twenty deaths from pure fright since the bombardment began, and I expect to see more before the siege ends, or people get callous to the possibilities of sudden extermination that are afforded them a hundred times a day. Is the person to whom you refer a woman or a child?"

"A young girl——" she was beginning, when a buxom little figure, black veiled and habited like herself, rose up as if from the bowels of the earth.

"I vill look. But I can see nozing," she called to someone invisible below. "It must be that you vait until my eyes shall become more strong." She shaded them, newly brought from semi-darkness and blinking in the hot, white sunlight. The Mother-Superior hurried to her, saying with a note of anxiety in her usually calm voice:

"Sister—Sister Cleophee; is anything the matter?"

"Mon Dieu! It is ze Reverend Mozer!" ejaculated the other, relief and joy expressed in the rapid movements of pliant hands and expressive eyes. "Nozing is ze matter, Reverend Mozer, if only you are safe."

"Quite safe, and so are the Sisters. Only the linen was upset."

"My 'eavens, but a miraculous escapement!" The supple hands and the expressive eyes and shoulders of Sister Cleophee made great play. "Me and Sister Tobias, 'ow we pray when we 'ear ze great gun, vith knowledge zat you and ze Sisters were upon the vay to ze Women's Laager. My faith, it vas terrible! Me, if I 'ad not make to ascend and learn how it go vid you, Lynette vould 'ave come running up to make discovery for herself. She behave like a little crazy, a little mad sing—I forget your vord for she zat have lost 'er vits! Sister Tobias and me, we 'ave to 'old 'er." The fine, expressive eyes went past the Mother-Superior, and lighted with evident relief on Saxham. "Ah, Monsieur le Docteur, it is incredible vat zat poor child she suffer. Madame 'ave told you——"

"Madame was about to tell me, my Sister," Saxham said, in his smooth, fluent French, "when you appeared upon the scene."

Sister Cleophee launched, unwitting of the Mother-Superior's gesture of vexation, into voluble explanations in that native language which M. le Docteur spoke so well.

Mademoiselle Mildare, the ward of Madame the Mother-Superior, was no coward. But no! the child had courage in plenty—it was the suspense that devoured her in the absence of the Mother, to whom Mademoiselle was most tenderly attached, that reduced her to a state of the most pitiable. The Sisters left at home each day would talk of the work and the fine weather—anything to distract the mind, that presented itself to them—but now, nothing was of any use. When the Reverend Mother came back at nightfall, behold a transformation. Mademoiselle would laugh and sing and chatter. Her eyes would shine like stars, she would be happy, said Sister Cleophee, with dramatic emphasis and gesture, as a soul in Paradise. Next day, taking her guardian from her side, would bring the terrors back, find redoubled the nervous sufferings of Mademoiselle, to-day reaching such a height that Sister Cleophee felt convinced that something must be done.

"Ah, my Sister, if I could do anything!" the Mother-Superior said, with the velvet Southern Irish inflection in the breathing aspirate, and the soft melodious cadence that made her pure, cultivated utterance so exquisite. The voice broke and faltered, and a spasm of mother-anguish wrung the firm mouth, and as a slow tear dimmed each of her underlids and splashed on the white guimpe she put out her hand blindly, and the sympathetic little Frenchwoman took it in both her own.

"Reverend Mozer, you can do zis. You can bring Monsieur le Docteur to see Lynette. You can 'ave his advice upon 'er case, and you can——"

Another fusillade of rifle-fire, sweeping from the west over Gueldersdorp, brought a repetition of the faint moaning cry from below. Saxham consulted the Reverend Mother with a look. She bent her head in silent assent. He hitched the horse's bridle to what had been the gatepost of the railway-official's front-garden, as she signed to him to descend the ladder leading to the Sisters' underground abode. And he went down to meet his Fate there.



XXVIII

The temporary Convent was a roomy trench dug out of the red gravelly sand, lined with the inevitable sheets of corrugated iron, and roofed with the same material, supported by a solid frame of steel rails. Wide chinks between the metal sheets gave admission to light and air, and earthen drain-pipes made ventilators in the walls. But the sunlight penetrated like spears of burning flame, and the air was stifling hot. The paraffin stove that heated irons for Sister Tobias smelled clamorously, and the droning of myriads of flies, not the least of the seven plagues of Gueldersdorp, kept up a persistent bass to the shrill singing of the little tin kettle. Later, when the April rains began, and the tarpaulins were pulled over the sand-bagged roof, tin lamps burning more paraffin did battle with Cimmerian darkness.

Saxham's professional approval was won by the marvellous cleanliness and neatness of the place, divided into living-room and dormitory by a heavy green baize curtain, that at the Convent had shut off the noise of the great classroom from the rest of the house. The curtain was drawn, hiding the little iron cots brought from the Sisters' cells, ascetic couches whose narrow wire mattresses must afford scant room for repose to double sleepers now, where all were crowded, and Conventual rules must be in abeyance. The outer place held a deal table, the oil cooking-stove; some household utensils shining with cleanliness were ranged upon a shelf, and several pictures hung upon the walls. Upon a bracket the silver Crucifix from the altar of the Convent chapel gleamed against the background of a snowy, lace-bordered linen cloth. There were orderly piles of cleaned and mended clothes, military and civilian, the garments of sick and wounded male patients, who would leave the Hospital without a thought of the unselfish women who had foregone sleep to patch jackets and sew on missing buttons. There were haversacks of coarse canvas for the Volunteers, finished and partly made, with ammunition-pouches and bandoliers. And Sister Tobias stood ironing at the deal table, partly screened by a line of drying linen, while Sister Mary-Joseph turned the mangle, and the little brisk novice, her round cheeks no longer rosy, folded with active hands. The Dop Doctor's keen quick glance took note of the patient cheerful weariness written on the three faces, then rested on one other face there.

Its wild white-rose fairness had dulled into the pallor of old ivory. There were deep, bluish shadows about the eyes and round the mouth, and the hollow at the base of the throat, where the pulse throbbed and fluttered visibly, had grown deep. Her red-brown hair had lost its burnished beauty. It had become dull like her skin, and her garments hung loosely upon the form whose soft roundnesses had fallen away. But her eyes had changed most. Their golden-hazel irises had faded to pale bronze, the full, fair eyelids had shrunk, the pupils were distended to twice their natural size. She sat upon a stool in a corner, a slight girlish figure in a holland skirt and white cambric blouse-bodice, her slender waist girdled with a belt of brown leather, the colour of her little shoes. Huddled up against the corrugated-iron wainscot of the rough earth wall, the obsession of fear that dilated her eyes and parched her lips shook her in recurrent gusts of trembling, whenever the guns of the Gueldersdorp batteries spoke in thunder, whenever the Boer artillery bellowed Death from the heights above. For since the great gun had spoken from East Point, Death's red sickle had not ceased to ply its task.

Some work, one of the coarse canvas haversacks made by the nuns for Gueldersdorp's enrolled defenders, lay at the girl's feet. Her right hand, horrible to see in its incessant, mechanical activity, made continually the motion of sewing. Her eyes stared blankly, unwinkingly at the opposite wall, and the gusts of trembling went over her without cessation. At a more deafening crash than ordinary, an irrepressible scream would break from her, and her hand would snatch at an invisible garment as though she plucked back its imaginary wearer from peril by main force.

"She sees nobody. She hear nozing when we speak—she vould feel nozing, if you should pinch or shake her. Was I not right, Reverend Mozer, to say it is time zat somesing should be done?"

The shrill whisper came from Sister Cleophee. The Mother-Superior made a sign in assent. Beyond words, her heart was crying—Oh, misery and joy in one mingled draught to have won such love as this from Richard's child! But her face was impassive and stern, and her eyes, looking over Saxham's great shoulder as he stood silently watching at the bottom of the ladder stairway, imposed silence on the busy, observant, tactful Sisters, who continued their labours without a break, as the sewing hand went diligently to and fro, and the recurrent convulsive shudders shook the girl's slight frame, and the irrepressible cry of anguish was wrung from her at each ear-splitting shellburst. And yet, with all her agony of love intensifying her gaze, the Mother did not see as much as Saxham, who took in every detail and symptom with skilled, consummate ease, realizing the desperate effort that strove for self-command, noting the exhaustion of suspense in the dropped lines of the half-open, colourless mouth, the incipient mental breakdown in the vacant stare of the dilated eyes, the mechanical action of the stitching needle-hand, the convulsive shudder that rippled through the slight figure at each boom, or crash, or fusillade of rifle-fire that drifted over the shrapnel-torn veld and through the battered town. He threw a swift whisper over his shoulder presently, that only reached the ear of the Mother-Superior, standing behind him, her tall shape concealed from the sufferer's sight by his great form.

"How long has this been going on?"

She whispered back: "I am told ever since the bombardment began. Every day, and at night too, should duty detain me at one or another of the Hospitals."

He added in the same low tone:

"She has a morbid terror of death under ordinary circumstances?"

The Mother-Superior murmured, a hand upon the ache in her bosom:

"Not of death for herself. For—another."

His purely scientific attitude must have already abandoned him when he knew gladness that Self was not the dominant note in this dumb threnody of fear. But he wore the professional mask of the physician as he ordered:

"Let one of the Sisters speak to her."

The Mother-Superior glanced at the nun who was ironing, and then at the figure on the stool. The Sister was about to obey when the Boer Maxim-Nordenfelt on the southern position rattled. There was a hissing rush overhead, and as a series of sharp, splitting cracks told that a group of the shining little copper-banded shells had burst, and that their splinters were busily hunting far and wide for somebody to kill, the stitching hand dropped by the girl's side. A new wave of shuddering went over the desolate young figure, pitiable and horrible to see. Dull drops of sweat broke out upon her temples in the shadow of her red-brown hair.

"How are you getting on with your work, dearie?"

Sister Tobias had spoken to her gently. She moved her head and her fixed eyes in a blind way, and the stitching hand resumed its mechanical task, but she gave no answer, except with the shudderings that shook her, as a lily is shaken in an autumn blast.

Then Saxham stepped backwards noiselessly, climbed the steep ladder stairway, and stood waiting for the Mother-Superior in the blazing yellow sunshine, beside the post to which his horse was hitched. The Mother followed instantly. He was making some pencil memoranda in a shabby notebook, and kept his eyes upon his writing, and made a mere mask of his square, pale face as he began:

"It—the case presents a very interesting development. The subject has at one time or other—probably the critical period of girlhood—sustained a severe physical and mental shock?"

The great grey eyes swam in sudden tears that were not to be repressed, as the Mother-Superior remembered the finding of that lost lamb on the veld seven years before. She bowed her head in silent assent.

"You would wish candour," Saxham said, looking away from her emotion. "And I should tell you that this is grave."

"I know it," her desperate eyes said more plainly than her scarcely moving lips. "But so many others are suffering in the same way, and there is nothing that can be done for any of them."

He answered with emphasis that struck her cold. "Some measures must be taken in the case, and without delay. This state of things must not go on." He saw that the Mother-Superior caught her breath and wrung her hands together in the loose, concealing sleeves as she said, with a breath of anguish:

"If she only had more self-control."

"She has self-control." He echoed the word impatiently. "She is using every ounce she has for all she is worth. She has used it too long and too persistently."

"I will say then, if she only had more faith!"

"I know nothing of faith," Saxham said curtly; "I deal in common-sense."

She could have asked if it were commonly sensible for a creature made by God, and existing but by His will, to live without Him? But she put the temptation past her. No cordial flame of mutual esteem and liking ever sprang up between these two, often brought together in their mutual work of help and healing. She recognised Saxham's power, she admitted his skill. But, as his practised eye had diagnosed in the beloved of her heart the signs of physical and mental crisis, so her clear gaze deciphered in his face the story written by those unbridled years of vice and dissipation, and knew him diseased in soul. She may have been fully acquainted with all Gueldersdorp had learned of him, going here, there, and everywhere, as was her wont, in obedience to her Spouse's call. But if so, she never betrayed Saxham. There was no resentment, only delicate irony in the curve of her finely-modelled lips as she queried:

"Am I so deficient in the quality of common-sense?"

"Madam," he said, "you have manifested it in each of the many instances where I have been brought in contact with you. But in your solicitude for this young girl you have shown, for the first time in my experience of you, some lack of good judgment, and have inflicted, and do inflict, severe suffering on her."

Her eyes flashed grey fire under her stern brows as she demanded:

"How, pray?"

"It is out of the question, I suppose," Saxham said coldly, "that you should slacken in your ministrations among the sick and wounded, and keep out of daily and hourly danger—for her sake?"

"Impossible," her voice answered, and her heart added unheard: "Impossible, unless I should be false to my Heavenly Bridegroom out of love for the child He gave."

"Then," said Saxham bluntly, "unless these recurrent nerve-storms are to culminate in cerebral lesion and mental and physical collapse—a result more easy to avert than to deal with—take the girl about with you."

"But——" the Mother uttered in irrepressible dismay. "I—we go everywhere!"

It was most true. He had a vision, as she said it, of the black-robed, white-coifed, cheerful Sisters passing in couples through the shrapnel-littered streets, between houses of gaping walls, and shattered roofs, and glassless windows, cheerful, serene, helpful, bringing comfort to the dying, and assistance to the sick, oblivious of whistling bullets and bursting shells. And the most arduous duties, the most repulsive tasks, the most danger-fraught errands, were hers, always by right, and claim, and choice. What a woman it was! A very Judith in Israel. He knew that Judith did not like him, but unconcealed admiration was in his blue eyes as he looked at her.

"I know it. Let her go everywhere. It is the sole chance, and—you spoke of faith just now.... If you have it for yourself and the religious women of your Order, who go about doing good in confidence of the protection—I do not speak in mockery—of an Almighty Hand, why can't you have it for her?"

She had never seemed so noble in his eyes as when she took that implied rebuke of his, with meek bending of her proud head, and candid self-condemnation in the eyes that were lowered and then raised to his, and beautiful humility in her speech:

"Sir, your reproach is just; it is I who have been lacking in faith. And—it shall be as you advise."

The distant bugle blared out its warning. The bell tolled twice, stopped, and tolled four; the smaller bells echoed. The voices of the sentries came to their ears, loudly at first, then more distant, then reduced to the merest spider-thread of sound:

"'Ware big gun! South quarter, 'ware!"

"I must go to her," the Mother-Superior said, and passed him swiftly and went down the ladder. Saxham followed. The white figure on the stool had not stirred, apparently. Its blank eyes still stared at the wall, and the mechanical hand moved, sewing at nothing, as diligently as ever.

"Lynette!"

The fixed, blindly-staring eyes came to life. Colour throbbed back into the wan ivory cheeks. The mouth lost its vacant droop. She rose up from the stool with a joyful cry, and, stumbling in her haste, ran into the outstretched arms. As they wrapped about her, clinging to her sole earthly friend and guardian as though she could never let go, came the crash of the driving-charge, the yelling Brocken-hunt of the passage of the huge projectile, the ear-splitting din of the shellburst. She lifted up a radiant face of laughing defiance, and then choked and quivered and burst out crying, leaning her panting young bosom against the black habit, and weeping as though her whole being must dissolve, Undine-like, in tears.

Ah, the lovely feminine woman who weeps and clings! She will never lose her dominion over the sons of men. The appealing glances of her beautiful wet eyes melt the stoniest male hearts, the soft tendril-like wreathing of her arms about the pillar of salt upon the Plain would have had power to change it back into a breathing human being once more, if Lot had looked back, instead of his helpmeet. Her sterner sisters may feel as keenly, love as tenderly, sorrow even more bitterly than she. Who will believe it among the sons of dead old Adam, who first felt the heaving bosom pant against his own, and saw the first bright tear-showers fall—forerunners of what oceans of world-sorrow to be shed hereafter, when the Angel of the flaming sword drove the peccant pair from Paradise. Ah, the fair, weak woman who weeps and clings!

And Owen Saxham, watching Lynette from the ladder-foot, and the Mother-Superior, clasping her and murmuring soft comfort into the delicate, fragile ear under the heaped waves of red-brown hair, shared the same thought.

How this trembling, vibrating, emotional creature will love one day, when the man arrives to whom imperious Nature shall bid her render up her all!

In whom, prayed the unselfish mother-heart, willing to be bereft of even the Heaven-sent consolation for the sake of the beloved, in whom may she find not only the earthly mate-fellow, but the kindred soul. For, all-pitying Mother of Mercy! should she, too, be doomed to stake all upon a wavering, unstable, headlong Richard, what will happen then?

Looking at the pair, Saxham thought of Ruth and Naomi. Lynette's tears had been dried quickly, like all joy-drops that the eyes shed. She was talking low and earnestly, pleading her cause with clinging hands and wistful looks and coaxing tones that were broken sometimes by a sob and sometimes by a little peal of girlish laughter.

"Mother, I am not made of sugar to be melted in the sun, or Dresden china to be broken. I am strong enough to take my share of the work; I am brave enough to bear anything—anything," she urged, "if only I may be with you. But to sit cooped up here day after day, safe and sheltered, sewing powder-bags or giving Katie French lessons, or helping Sister Tobias, and listening to the guns"—the blood fled from her cheeks and the great pupils of her eyes dilated until they looked all black in her face of whiteness—"the dreadful guns, and wondering where you are when the shells are bursting"—her voice rose in anguish—"I can't bear it! Mother, do you hear?" She threw her beautiful head back entreatingly, and the pulses in her white throat throbbed under Saxham's eyes, and her slight hands were desperate in their clutch upon the arms that held her. "I want my share of the risk, whatever it is. I will have it! It is my right. I have tried to be good and patient, but I can't, I can't, I can't stand this any more!"

Her voice broke upon a sob, and Saxham said from the doorway that was filled by his great shoulders from post to post:

"You will not have to stand it any more. The Reverend Mother has reconsidered her decision. She will take you to the Hospital and elsewhere from to-day."

The man's curt manner and authoritative tone brought Lynette for the first time to knowledge of his presence. Her glance went to him, and joy was mingled with surprise in the face she turned towards the Mother-Superior.

"Really, Mother?"

The Mother-Superior, though her own still face had flushed with quick, irrepressible resentment at Saxham's tone, said cheerfully:

"It is true, my child. Dr. Saxham thinks it will be best for you. Dr. Saxham, this is my ward, Miss Mildare."

Saxham made his little brusque bow. Lynette, bending her lovely head, gave a grateful glance at the khaki-clad figure with the great hulking shoulders, standing under the patch of hot blue sky that the top of the ladder vanished in, and a strange shock and thrill went through the man's whole frame. His odd, gentian-coloured eyes under the heavy thunder-cloud of black eyebrows lightened so suddenly in reply that the girl felt repelled and half frightened. She was conscious of a curious oppression. As for Saxham, a delicate, stinging fire ran newly in his veins. Something stirred in the secret depths of him, and came to life with an awakening thrill exquisitely poignant and sweet. For this slight, unsophisticated, Convent-bred creature, slender as a lily, reared in innocence among the blameless, was rich as her frail, lovely mother had been before her in the mysterious allure of sex. Beautiful Lady Bridget-Mary at the zenith of her stately beauty had never possessed one-tenth of the seductive charm that emanated from this young girl. Thoughts of the stored-up golden honey seen gleaming through the translucent waxen cells of the virgin comb made the senses reel as you looked at her, if you were man born of woman, with your passions alive and keen-edged in you, and your blood had not lost the lilt of the song that it has sung in healthy veins of sons of Adam since the Woman was made for and given to the Man. For Artemis may invite, if unconsciously, the hot pursuit of the hunter; the shy, close-folded nymph among the sedges may awaken the primal desire of Pan among the reeds.... Saxham, even in the years of his degradation, had scarcely sunk to the level of the crook-shinned, hairy-thighed, hoofed satyr. But he had built his nest with the birds of night, and slaked his thirst at impure sources, and only now did he realise how his mad dream of vengeance upon the Power that had cast him down and wrecked his future was to recoil upon himself. "I have done with Love," he had said, "and with Hope, and with Life as it is known of the honourable and the upright and the cleanly among men for ever!"

And now ... his thoughts were tipped with fire as he drank in the suddenly-awakened, vivid, delicate beauty of Lynette Mildare. Now he realised the depths of his own mad folly. Oh, to have had the right to hope again, to love again, to live again, and be grateful to David, who had betrayed him, and Mildred, who had deserted him—to this end! Oh, never to have lost the honourable claim to woo such loveliness as this and win such purity, and wear both as a talisman upon his heart for ever! He drew breath heavily as he looked at the girl, transformed and glowing under the touch she loved, shining from within like some frail, transparent alabaster lamp with the light that he had helped to rekindle. And as his great chest expanded with deep draughts of the subtle, intoxicating atmosphere of her, and the blood hummed through his veins to that new measure, the last link of his old fetters fell clanking to the ground. And then, with a sting of intolerable remorse, came the memory of his shameful five years' Odyssey spent as a hog among other hogs of the human kind. It had not been an overthrow. It had been a surrender of all that was noble and strong in him to all in him that was despicable and weak and vile. And his soul shuddered, and his heart contracted in the sickening clutch of shame.



XXIX

He awakened from that lost moment of enthralment to the pang and the shock of self-discovery, and to the knowledge that somebody was hailing him by name from the top of the ladder.

"Saxham! Doctor! Are you below there?"

It was the gay, fresh voice of Beauvayse, halted with a handful of Irregulars, bandoliered, carrying their rifles and the day's provisions, wearing their bayonets on their hips, and sitting their wiry little horses with the ease of old troopers in the lee-side of the piled-up mound of sandbags that roofed the underground convent. Five men and a Corporal of the Town Guard, similarly burdened and accoutred—we know the pale Cockney eyes and the thin face of the Corporal, whose freckles have long ago vanished in a uniform gingerbread hue—had also taken momentary shelter from one of the intermittent blizzards of Mauser bullets that drifted through Gueldersdorp.

One Irregular was sitting on an earth-filled packing-case, swearing softly, nursing a disabled right arm, and looking at the corded network of hairy, sunburned muscles that were delicately outlined in the bright red stream that trickled from beneath the rolled-up shirt-sleeve of raspy "greyback."

"We saw your hairy tied up outside, Doctor, and 'sensed' your whereabouts, as McFadyen says. Can the ladies spare you for a moment? Sorry to be a nuisance, but one of my fellows has got winged on our way to relieve the garrison at Maxim Outpost South, and though he swears he is as fit as a fiddle, I don't believe he ought to come on."

"I'm all right, Sir, 'pon me Sam I am!" protested the dismounted trooper. "It's a bit stiff, but the bleedin' 'll take that off. I shan't shoot a tikkie the worse for it. Lay anybody 'ere a caulker I don't!"

Nobody took up the bet, fortunately for the sportsman, as surgical examination proved that the bullet had gone sheer through the fleshy part of the upper arm, breaking the bone, just missing the artery, and leaving a clean hole.

"You'll have to go to Hospital, my man," pronounced Saxham.

The face of the wounded Irregular lengthened in disgust. "My crimson luck! And I'd made up my mind to pick off a brace o' them blasted Dutch wart 'ogs over that there bad job of pore Bob Ellis."

He blinked violently, and gulped down something that rose in his brown, muscular throat as the voice of a comrade, middle-aged like himself, coffee-baked as a Colonial, and also speaking with the accents of the English barrack-room, took up the tale.

"Bob Ellis was 'is pal, Sir, and mine, too. We was in the same battery of 'Orse Artillery at Ali Musjid, an' we went up along of Lord Kitchener to Khartoum. An' they shot Bob yesterday. Through the 'ead, clean, an' 'e never spoke another word."

"Through the loop-'ole o' the parapet, it was," went on the wounded man. "Bein' in the advance trench, we've got on neighbourly terms like, with the Dutchies, and Tom Kelly, wot 'as just bin speakin', 'eard Bob Ellis promisin' this bloke as 'ow if 'e'd on'y 'urry up an' git killed soon enough, Bob would 'ave 'is farm and 'is frow when 'e come marchin' along to Pretoria. 'Oppin' mad the Dopper was at that, an' the names 'e called pore Bob was something disgraceful. An' when 'e got Bob through the loop-'ole, me an' Kelly made our minds up to show a bit o' fancy shootin' and lay 'im out in turn. That's 'ow it was, Sir. An' now"—the voice grew shaky—"they've corked me. Corked me, by God I—an' there's not a bloke among the lot of us but me can play the concertina." With his undamaged arm he swung round his haversack, bulging at the top with a cheap, bone-keyed, rosewood-veneered, gaudy-paper-sided instrument of German make, and hung his head over it in silence.

"But what on earth has the concertina got to do with it?" Saxham was frankly puzzled, and Beauvayse, with all his professional knowledge of "Tommy," was for once nonplussed.

"You'd better explain to the Doctor, Corporal Leash. I'm out of the running when it comes to killing men with concertinas. And—you don't play as badly as all that, do you?"

"On the contrywise, Sir," explained the comrade Kelly, "plays uncommon well, he does—all the tunes of the latest music-'all and patriotic songs."

"An' them blasted Doppers are uncommon fond o' music, d'ye see, Sir," explained the wounded trooper. "They can't keep their ugly 'eads down behind the sand-bags when they hears it. Up they pops 'em over the edge and then—you take care they don't pop down no more."

The gay young laughter of Beauvayse was infectious, while white teeth showed, or teeth that were not white, in the tanned faces of Irregulars and Town Guardsmen. Even the mourning comrades grinned, and Saxham smiled grimly as Beauvayse cried:

"By George, a more original method of reprisal I never came across! But it's clear if you can't shoot with that drilled arm of yours you can't play the concertina. Wish I could knock a tune out of the thing, Leash, for your sake—enough to make a Boer put his head up. But I'm a duffer at musical instruments—always was. What do you say, my man?"

"Beg pardon, Sir." The Corporal with the Town Guardsmen saluted, making the most of his five feet two inches. "I can pl'y the squiffer—I mean the concertina, Sir—a fair treat for a hammatore. And if I might be let to tyke this man's plyce at Maxim Outpost South, Sir, I could 'elp serve the gun, too, Sir—we've bin' attendin' Artillery Drill in spare hours."

"I shouldn't think you had any spare hours to spare?" Beauvayse looked at the thin, tanned face with liking, and the keen pale eyes met his fairly.

"We haven't, Sir, but we manage some'ow."

"But what about your own duty?"

"I'm tykin' these men over, Sir." He indicated a solid family grocer, a clerk of the County Court, a pseudo-Swiss baker, and two Navy Reserve men reduced to the ranks for aggressive intemperance of the methylated-spirit kind, which, in the absence of other liquor, had prevailed among a certain class, until the intoxicating medium was confiscated by Government.

"Captain Thwaite 'as spared us from the Cemetery Works to relieve Corporal Brice an' 'is little lot at Angle VII. South Trenches. A telephone-message come from our Colonel to say Brice's men was bad with rheumatism and dysentery—but Brice is all right an' fit, Sir—and"—the pale eyes pleaded out of the brickdust-coloured face—"I'd like the charnce o' gettin' nearer to the enemy, Sir—an' that's the truth."

Beauvayse conceded. "Very well. I'll square things with your commanding officer as we go along, and explain matters to the Colonel per telephone from Maxim Outpost South. Come on there when you've handed over your men to Brice."

The pale eyes danced. "Thank you, Sir."

"An' I'll owe you a dollar whisky-peg for the good turn," muttered the perforated musician, as he handed over the cherished concertina to the volunteer, "till next Sunday that I see you in the stad."

"Righto!" said Corporal Keyse, accepting the sacred charge.

"Look here, though," came from Beauvayse, "there's one thing you must remember—what's your name?"

"Keyse, sir—Corporal, A Company, Gueldersdorp Town Guard."

"Well, Keyse, you've heard Meisje hiccoughing ninety-four-pound projectiles all the morning, haven't you?"

"Couldn't possibly miss 'er, sir"—the pale eyes twinkled as the Corporal finished—"not as long as she misses me."

"She has a talent for missing, otherwise a good many of us fellows would have heard the Long Call before now. But most of her delicate little attentions—with the exception of one shell she sent over the Women's Laager, to show the people there that she doesn't mind killin' females and children if she can't get men—most of 'em are meant for Maxim Outpost South; and one of 'em may get home sometimes, when the German gunner isn't thinking of his sweetheart. Then, if you find yourself soarin' heavenwards in a kind of scattered anatomical puzzle-map of little bits, don't blame me for obligin' you, that's all."

There was a guffaw from the listeners. W. Keyse saluted, cheerfully joining in.

"I shan't s'y a word, sir."

"By George, I believe you!" said Beauvayse. "What's up? Seen a ghost?"

Saxham had swung his wallet round, producing carbolic, antiseptic gauze, First Aid bandages, and other surgical indispensables from its recesses, as by legerdemain, and a tall, stately black figure, followed by a tall, slender white figure, had risen from the bowels of the earth. The Mother-Superior, taking in the situation and the need of her at a glance, called a brief order down the ladder stairway, and went swiftly over to Saxham, whipping a blue apron out of a big pocket, tying it about her, and pulling on a pair of sleeves of the same stuff as she went. Lynette turned to take the basin of hot water that the arm of Sister Tobias extended from below, and the jaws of W. Keyse snapped together. Until he twigged the bronze-red coils of hair under the broad, rough straw hat, he had thought ... Cripps!

We know how the dancing, provoking mischievous blue eyes and adorable wrist-thick golden pigtail of Greta du Taine dwelt in his love-stricken remembrance. Her worshipped image had got a little rubbed and dimmish of late to be sure, but breathe on the colours, and you saw them come out clear, and oh! bewilderingly lovely.

Billy Keyse had never even beheld the enchantress since that never-to-be-forgotten morning when he had seen her pass at the head of the serpentine procession of pupils, slowly winding across the Market Square. But he knew she was still in Gueldersdorp. He felt her, for one thing. We know that in his case Love's clairvoyant instinct had got its nightcap on. We saw Greta depart on the train bound North and branch off East for the Du Taine homestead near Johannesburg. But if she were not in Gueldersdorp, why did the left breast-pocket of the now soiled and heavily-patched khaki tunic bulge so? There were six letters inside there, tied up with a frayed bit of blue ribbon. Hers? 'Strewth, they were! And each what you might call a Regular One-er of a love-letter. Never mind the paper being thumb-marked as well as cheaply inferior, one cannot expect all the refinements of civilisation in a beleaguered town. It was the spelling that—although we know W. Keyse to be no cold orthographist—occasionally gave him pause as he perused and re-perused the greasy but passionate page. And why did she sign herself "Fare Air?" The sense of ingratitude pierced him even as he wondered. Why shouldn't she if she chose? What a proper beast he was to grumble! Him, that ought to be proud of her demeaning herself to stoop to a young chap in a lower station, so to call. And her a Regular Swell.

He hugged the letters against him with the arm belonging to the hand that held the concertina. Beloved missives, where was the worshipped writer now? Sitting by a tapestry-frame, for he could not imagine her peeling potatoes, down in the Convent bombproof, dreaming of him, weeping over his last letter, or blushfully aware of his vicinity, panting at the bottom of the ladder, listening for the beloved accents of the man who ... Hold hard, though! she had never heard the voice of W. Keyse; or he hers for that matter, but he would have recognised it among a thousand. He had told her so, writing with ink pencil, of the kind that when sucked in moments of forgetfulness tastes peculiarly horrible, and tinges the saliva with violet, at spare moments in the trench. A phlegmatic Chinaman acted as Love's postman, handing in the envelopes that were addressed to Mr. W. Keyse, Esquer, in caligraphy that began in the top left-hand corner, and trickled gradually down into the right-hand bottom one. Pumping the Celestial was no use. John Tow sabee'd only that a fair foreign devil gave the one missive, with a tikkie for delivery, and 'spose one time Tow makee plenty good walkee back with anulla paper some pidgin bime-bye catchee more tikkie. If walkee back no paper, too muchee John catchee hellee, reaping only reproaches and no tikkie at all.

Judge how the heart of W. Keyse bumped against the concertina when the slender vision in the holland skirt and white blouse and broad straw hat appeared from underground. It was not she, though, Queen of heroic thoughts, inspirer of deeds of daring yet to be done, who followed the Mother-Superior.

It was the loveliest girl Beauvayse had ever seen, or ever would see. The girl who had stood up in defence of three nuns against a threatening gang of rowdy Transvaalers, one day in the Recreation Ground,—the girl who had passed as the Staff dismounted at the Hospital gate on the day of appropriation. The Mayor had had no chance of fulfilling his promise of an introduction. The Mayor's wife, with her two children, was an inmate of the Women's Laager. But at last the kind little genii that deal with happenings and chances had brought Beauvayse and his divinity face to face. Now she rose out of the Convent dug-out, in the waste that had been the railway-official's front-garden, like a fair white Psyche-statue, delivered in the course of some convulsion of Nature from the matrix of the earth. And she was even more exquisite than his remembrance of her, even more ...

Beauvayse descended abruptly from an empyrean flight of poetic imagery to remember his torn and soiled silk polo-shirt with its rolled-up sleeves, his earth-stained cords, girt with a belt of vari-coloured webbing, his muddy leather leggings and boots with their caked and dusty spurs, telling of hard service and unresting activity.

But he looked radiantly handsome as he leapt to the ground and came forward, his tall athletic figure, trained by arduous toil and incessant work until the last superfluous ounce of flesh had vanished, looking the personification of manliness, his tanned face, still clean-shaven save for the slight fair moustache, one to set any maiden dreaming of its straight clean-cut features and lazy, long-shaped grey-green eyes. The wide felt hat he touched in salute sat with a jaunty air on the close-cropped golden head. Here was a gallant, heartsome vision to greet Lynette, stepping after the Mother into that outer world, where fire belched warning from iron mouths, and steel destruction sped through the skies, and bullets sang like hornets past your head, or hit the ground near your feet, sending up little bushy columns and spirts of dust.

The wounded man, now carbolised, plugged, and bandaged by Saxham's dexterous hands, took the hastily-scrawled admission-order, included his officer, the ladies, and the Doctor in a left-handed salute, distributed a parting wink among his comrades, counselled W. Keyse in a hoarse whisper to go tender on the off-side G of the instrument he dandled, and trudged sturdily away in the direction of the Hospital.

"Thank you, ma'am. There's no stealing a march on you," Beauvayse said to the Mother-Superior, touching his hat with his gay, swaggering grace, as she emptied a bowl of red water on the ground, and whisked the blue apron and sleeves back into the vast recesses of the mysterious pocket. "But you're spoiling us. Hot water isn't on tap, as a rule, for Field-dressings, and—and won't you——" He reddened to the fair untanned skin upon his temples. "Mayn't I ask, ma'am, to be introduced to Miss Mildare?"

The Mother complied with his request, smiling indulgently. She had known and loved this bright boy's mother in her early married days. The Dark Rose of Ireland and the White Rose of Devon, a noted Society phrasemonger had dubbed them, seeing them together on the lawn one Ascot Cup Day, their light draperies and delicate ribbons whip-whipping in the pleasant June breeze, ivory-skinned, jetty-locked Celtic beauty and blue-eyed, flaxen-locked Saxon fairness in charming, confidential juxtaposition under one lace sunshade, lined with what has been the last new fashionable colour under twenty names, since then; only that year they called it Rose fane. Richard Mildare had praised the sunshade, a Paris affair supplied by Worth with his creation, Lady Biddy Bawne's beautiful gown. He asked Lady Biddy to marry him at the back of the box on the Grand Stand when Verneuil was winning the Cup. Who shall dare say that he was not then a sincere lover? thought the Mother-Superior of the Convent of the Holy Way. And then she recalled her wandering thoughts, and turned them to the One Lover who never betrays His chosen. And her rapt eyes looking up, seemed to pierce beyond the flaming sky-vault overhead. She forgot all else, suddenly snatched from earthly consciousness to beatific realisation of the Divine.

There had been for some minutes now a lull in the bombardment from the ridges. The enemy's guns were silent a space, and the hot batteries of harassed Gueldersdorp snatched a brief respite while Boers gathered for the nine o'clock coffee-drinking round their little snapping fires of dried dung and tindery bush. Now and then a rifle cracked, and a bullet sang past or whitted in the dust. But comparative peace brooded over the shattered hamlet of wrecked homes and ploughed-up, littered roads, and raw earthworks blistering in the pitiless sun.

"Miss Mildare." Beauvayse was speaking in that pleasant, boyish voice of his, standing close to Lynette, his tall head bending for a glimpse of the eyes of golden hazel, that were shaded by the broad, rough straw hat; "if you knew how I've waited for this. Nearly seven weeks since one day in early October, when I saw you on the Recreation Ground, where some brutes were annoying you, and a day or so later you went by the Hospital as I rode up with the Chief. But, of course, you don't remember?" His eyes begged her to say she did.

"I remember quite well." It was the voice he had imagined for her—low, and round, and clear, with just an undernote of plaintiveness matching the wistful appeal of her eyes. At the first sound of it a shudder of exquisite delight went through him, as though she had touched him with her slender white, bare hand on the naked breast.

"Thank you for not quite forgetting. You don't know what it means to me, being kept in mind by you."

"I do not know that I kept you in mind." There was a touch of girlish dignity in her utterance. "I only said that I remembered quite well."

He bent his head nearer, and lowered his pleasant voice to a coaxing, confidential tone.

"You'll think me a presumptuous kind of fellow for talking like this, won't you, Miss Mildare? But the circumstances are exceptional, aren't they? We're shut up away from the big world outside in a little world of our own, and—such chances fall to every man and most of the women here: a shrapnel bullet or a shell-splinter might stop me before another hour goes by, from ever saying—what I've felt for weeks on end had got to be said—what I'd risk a dozen lives, if I had 'em, to get the opportunity of saying to you." His hot eagerness frightened her. Her downcast eyelids quivered, and her flushed maiden-face shrank from him.

"Oh, don't be angry! Don't move away!" Beauvayse entreated; for Lynette's anxious glance had gone in search of the Mother-Superior, with whom Saxham was now discussing the nuns' idea of utilising the Convent as a Convalescent Hospital. In another instant she would have taken refuge by her side. "If you knew how I have thought of you and dreamed of you since I saw you! If you could only understand how I shall think of you now! If you could only realise how awfully, utterly strange it is to feel as I am feeling!" His voice was a tremulous, fervent whisper. His eyes gleamed like emeralds in the shadow of the wide-brimmed felt hat. "And if I die to-day, it won't end there. I shall think of you, and long for you, and worship you wherever I am!"

"Oh, why do you talk to me like this?"

Lynette's whisper was as tremulous as Beauvayse's own. Her eyes lifted to the glowing, ardent face for one shy instant, and found it good to look upon. Men, young and not undesirable, had tried to make love to her before, at dances and parties and picnics to which she had been chaperoned by the Mayor's wife. But the first hot glance, the first word that carried the vibration of a passionate meaning, had wakened the old terror in her, and bidden her escape. The nymph had always taken flight at the first step upon the bank, the first rustle of the sedges. She had never lingered to feel the air stirred by another burning breath. She had never asked any one of those other men why he talked like that. Beauvayse went on:

"Perhaps I even seem a little mad to you—fellows have told me lately that I went on as if I had a tile off. Perhaps I'm what the Scotch call 'fey.' I've got Highland blood in me, anyhow. And you have set it on fire, I think—started it boiling and racing and leaping in my veins as no woman ever did before. You slender white witch! you fay of mist and moonlight, you've woven a spell, and tangled my soul in it, and nothing in Life or in Death will ever loose me again." His tone changed, became infinitely caressing. "How sweet and dear you are to be so patient with me, while I'm sending the Conventionalities to the rightabout and terrifying the Proprieties. Forgive me, Miss Mildare."

The pleading in his face was exquisite. She felt as a bee might feel drowning in honey, as she wreathed her white fingers together upon the silver buckle of the brown leather belt she wore, and said confusedly:

"I ... I believe I ought to be very angry with you."

His whisper touched her ear like a kiss, and set her trembling.

"But you're not?"

"I——"

She caught her breath as he came nearer. There was a fragrance from him—a perfume of youth and health and vitality—that was powerful, heady, intoxicating as the first warm, flower-scented wind of Spring, blowing down a mountain-kloof from the high ranges. Her white-rose cheeks took sudden warmth of hue, and her pale nostrils quivered. A faint, mysterious smile dawned upon her lips. Something of the old terror was upon her still, and yet—it was delicious to be afraid of him!

"Say that you aren't angry with me for being so thunderingly presumptuous. Please be kind to me and say it."

Her lips began to utter disjointed phrases. "What can it matter really?... Oh, very well, then ... if my saying so is of such ... importance...."

"More important than anything in the world!" he declared.

"Very well, then, I am not angry—not furiously so, at least." The bud of a smile repressed pouted her lips.

"And," he begged, "you'll let what I've said to you be our secret? Promise."

"Very well."

"You sweetest, kindest, loveliest——"

"Please don't," she entreated.

"And I may know your Christian name?" he persisted, "I've thought of everything in the world, and nothing's good enough to fit you."

"Oh, how silly!" Her eyes gleamed with laughter. "It is Lynette."

He caught at it with rapture. "Perfect! The last touch.... The scent of the rose, or say the dewdrop on it. By George, I'm in earnest!"

He had spoken incautiously loud. A grating voice addressing him pulled his head round.

"Lord Beauvayse ..."

"Did you speak to me, Doctor? As I was saying, Miss Mildare," he went on, continuing the blameless conversation, "dust-storms and flies are the twin curses of South Africa."

The harsh voice spoke to him again. He looked round, and met Saxham's eyes, hard and cold as blue stones. The Doctor said grimly:

"You may not be aware that your men are drawing fire."

It was undeniable fact. The bullets had begun to hit the ground under the horses' bellies, spirting little columns of dust and flattening against the stones. Coffee-drinking was over in the enemy's trenches, and the business of the day had begun again. Beauvayse bade the ladies good-morning, and swung himself into the saddle.

"Au revoir, Miss Mildare. Please get under cover at once." The proprietorship in the tone stung Saxham to wincing. "Good-morning, ma'am," he cried to the Mother-Superior, "we know you ignore bullets. So long, Doctor. Hope I shan't count one in your day's casualty-bag. Ready, boys?"

The chatting troopers sprang to alert attention. W. Keyse, pensively boring the sandy earth with the pneumatic auger of imagination, in search of the loved one believed to inhabit the Convent bomb-proof, was recalled to the surface by the curtly-uttered command, and knew the thrill of hero-worship as Beauvayse threw out his lightly-clenched hand, and the troopers, answering the signal, broke into a trot. The hot dust scurried at the horses' retreating heels. Corporal Keyse, trudging staunchly in their wake with his five Town Guardsmen, became ghostlike, enveloped in an African replica of the ginger-coloured type of London fog. And the Mother-Superior looked at her well-worn watch.

"My child, we must be moving if you are coming with me to the Women's Laager. I am nearly an hour late as it is."

"I am ready, Mother dear."

Lynette's eyes came back from following that dust-cloud in the distance to meet the hungry, jealous fires of Saxham's gaze.

He had seen Beauvayse's ardent look, and her shy heart's first leaf unfolded in the answering blush, and a spasm of intolerable anger gripped him as he saw. He turned away silently, cursing his own folly, and unhitched his horse's bridle from the broken gatepost. With the act a crowd rose up before Lynette and a frightened horse reared, threatening to fall upon three women who were hurrying along the sidewalk outside the Hospital, and a heavy-shouldered, black-haired man in shabby white drills stepped out of the throng and seized the flying bridoon-rein, and wrenched the brute down. She recognised the horse and the man again, and exclaimed:

"Why ... Mother, don't you remember the rearing horse outside the Hospital that day in October? It was Dr. Saxham who caught him, and saved us from getting hurt."

"And we never even thanked you." The Mother-Superior turned to Saxham with outstretched hand and the smile that made her grave face beautiful. "What you must have thought!..."

"I looked for the person who had been so prompt, but you had vanished—where, nobody seemed to know," Lynette told him with her clear eyes on the stern, square face. "And then a man in the crowd called out, 'It's the Dop Doctor!' And I thought what an odd nickname!..." She broke off in dismay. Saxham had become livid. His grim jaws clamped themselves together, and the blue eyes grew hard as stone. One instant he stood immovable, the Waler's bridle on his left arm, his right hand clenched upon the old hunting-crop. Then he said very coldly and distinctly:

"As you observe, it is a queer nickname. But, at any rate, I had fairly earned——"

The bugle from the Staff headquarters sounded, drowning the rest of the sentence. The Catholic Church bell tolled. The other bells took up the warning, and the sentries called again from post to post:

"'Ware gun, Number Two! Southern Quarter, 'ware!"

The Krupp bellowed from the enemy's north position, and cleverly lobbed a seven-pound shell not far behind that rapidly-moving, distant pillar of dust, the nucleus of which was a little troop of cantering Irregulars, and not far in front of the lower, slower-moving cloud, the heart of which was a little knot of tramping Town Guardsmen. The shell burst with a splitting crack, earth and flying stones mingled with the deadly green flame and the poisonous chemical fumes of the lyddite. Figures scurried hither and thither in the smoke and smother; one lay prone upon the ground....