nd inexorably gentle. She did not meet Richard's daughter before
nightfall. "She will not suffer now," she thought, even as she sent the
message that was to allay Lynette's anxiety, and give notice of her
whereabouts in case of need. Her mission led her to a half-wrecked shanty
at the south end of the town, where some Lithuanian emigrants herded
together in indescribable filth and misery. A woman who had been recently
confined lay there raving in puerperal fever. Until nightfall, when she
was removed to the Isolation Hospital on the veld, near the Women's
Laager, the Mother-Superior remained with the patient.

A burly, bushy-bearded man, with a peculiarly dark skin and strange steely
eyes, passing the broken window, caught sight of the noble profile and the
stately shoulders stooping above the miserable bed. Going home at dark,
the Mother heard a stealthy footstep following behind her.

Since the Town Guard had been withdrawn to man the trenches, many people,
revisiting their deserted dwellings, had found them plundered of movable
possessions, and, losing the fear of Eternity in wrath at the wholesale
evaporation of their worldly goods, had thenceforth remained to protect
them. Instances there had been of robbery from the person by thieves not
all tracked down by Martial Justice and made examples of.

The hovering human night-bird and the prowling human jackal, whose sole
end is money and money's worth, have no terrors for Holy Poverty. But
there are other creatures of prey more terrible than these. And the
padding footsteps that followed, hurrying when she hurried and slackening
when she went more slowly, and stopping dead when she paused and looked
round, conveyed to her a haunting sense of something sinister, and at the
same time greedy and guileful, that bided its time to spring.

She moved in long, swift, undulating rushes, her black robes sweeping
noiselessly as a great moth's wings over the well-known ground, her course
kept unfalteringly; but her heart shook her, and she gasped as the Convent
bomb proof neared in sight. She had wrought much and suffered more of
late, and she knew herself less strong than she had been. When the blue
light that hung from a post by the ladder-hole blinked "Home" through the
mirk of a night of thin rain and mist-shrouded stars, she knew infinite
relief. Her great eyes were as wild and strained as a hunted deer's, and
her bosom heaved with her panting breaths. She paused a moment to