eamed aside, and ran to the door
as she cried out and swayed forward, still clinging to the vibrating rope,
and turned there and fired a second shot, that struck her in the body.

Then he was gone, and the walls were crowding in on her to crush her, and
then receding to immeasurable distances, and the blood and air from her
pierced lungs bubbled through the bullet-holes in the serge stuff and the
scorched linen.

She stumbled a few steps blindly, then fell and lay choking, with that
strange gurgling and whispering in her ears, the rushing blood mingling
with the water of the puddles that the rain had made upon the littered
floor. She faltered out the name of her Master and Spouse, and commended
her pure soul to Him in utter humility. Death would have been a welcome
loosing of her bonds but for the Beloved left behind, at the mercy of the
merciless.

The stab of that remembrance lent her strength to struggle up upon her
knees. Ah, cruel! cruel!... But she must submit. Was it not the Holy Will?
She signed the Cross upon her bosom, with fingers already growing stiff,
and made a piteous little act of charity, forgiving the sin of the man
against herself, but not his crime against dead Richard's child. And she
stretched out long black-sleeved arms gropingly in the thick, numbing
darkness that hemmed her in, and moaned to the Mother of the motherless to
have pity!... pity!...

She swayed forwards then, like a stately falling column, and lay with
outspread arms upon the altar-step.

"Jesu.... Mary.... _The child!..._"

The sacred names were stifled in her blood. The last two words were nearly
her last sigh. Thenceforward there was no sound at all in the Convent
chapel, save the dull splash of rain, falling through the holes in the
broken roof upon the sodden floor, where the dead woman lay, face
downwards.

LII

No one had heeded the revolver-shot. The detonation of a cartridge or so
when a bombardment is going on, what does it count for? And yet, when the
burly figure of the runner from Diamond Town slipped out of the Convent
doorway and stole across the shrapnel-littered garden, and crossed the
veld towards the native town, it had been barely twilight--a twilight of
heavy, drenching rain, to be sure. Still, in it he had encountered those
who might have suspected afterwards....

Perhaps it would have been better had he stopped in Gueldersdorp and
mugged it out. But that sharp, prompt, swift, unsparing thing