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 khÂki 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 fanÉ. 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....

At the instant of the explosion Saxham had leaped forwards, setting his body and the horse's as a bulwark between Death and the two women. Now, though Lynette's rough straw hat had been whisked from her head by a force invisible, he saw her safe, caught in the Mother-Superior's embrace, sheltered by the tall, protecting figure as the sapling is sheltered by the pine.

"We are not hurt," the Mother protested, though her cheek had been cut by a flying flake of flint, and was bleeding. "But look ... over there!" She pointed over the veld to the prostrate brown figure, and a cry of alarm broke from Lynette.

"Oh, Mother, who ...?"

"It is a Town Guardsman," Saxham answered, his cold blue eyes meeting the wild frightened gaze of the pale girl. "Lord Beauvayse and the Irregulars got off scot-free. Reverend Mother, do not think of coming. Please go on to the Women's Laager. I will see to the wounded man, and follow by-and-by."

He mounted, refusing all offers of aid, and rode off. Looking back an instant, he saw the black figure of the woman and the white figure of the girl setting out upon their perilous journey over the bare patch of ground where Death made harvest every day. They kissed each other before they started, and again Saxham thought of Ruth and Naomi. If Ruth had been only one half as lovely as this Convent-grown lily, Boaz was decidedly a lucky man. But he had been a respectable, sober, steady-going farmer, and not a man of thirty-six without a ten-pound note in the world, with a blighted career to regret, and five years of drunken wastrelhood to be ashamed of. And yet ... the drunken wastrel had been a man of mark once, and earned his thousands. And the success that had been achieved, and lost, could be rewon, and the career that had been pursued and abandoned could be his—Saxham's—again. And what were his publishers doing with those accumulated royalties? For he knew from Taggart and McFadyen that his books still sold.

"The Past is done with," he said aloud. "Why should not the Future be fair?"

And yet he had nearly yielded to the impulse to own to those degraded years, and claim the nickname they had earned him, and take her loathing and contempt in exchange. What sudden madness had possessed him, akin to that unaccountable, overmastering surge of emotion that he had known just now when he saw her tears?

We know the name of the divine madness, but we know not why it comes. Suddenly, after long years, in a crowded place or in a solitude where two are, it is upon you or upon me. The blood is changed to strange, ethereal ichor, the pulse beats a tune that is as old as the Earth itself, but yet eternally new. Every breath we draw is rapture, every step we take leads us one way. One voice calls through all the voices, one hand beckons whether it will or no, and we follow because we must. With the Atlantic rolling between us I can feel your heart beat against mine, and your lips breathe into me your soul. The light that was upon your face, the look that was in your eyes as you gave the unforgettable, immemorial kiss, the clasp of your hands, the rising and falling of your bosom, like a wave beneath a sea-bird, like a sea-bird above a wave, shall be with me always, even to the end of time and beyond it.

For there are many loves, but one Love.

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