unning through the night, anywhere, nowhere, and
Bough would be riding after. She could hear the short wheezing gallop of
the tired pony when she laid her ear to the ground. And then the sjambok,
wielded by a strong and brutal hand, would bite into the quivering flesh
of the child, and she would shriek for mercy, and presently fall upon the
ground and lie there like one dead--acting that old tragedy over and over
again.

God was very kind to you, Reverend Mother, if He hid that sight from one
to whom she was so dear. But if His Blessed in Heaven have cognisance of
what takes place in this dull, distant speck of Earth, I think some salt
tears must needs have fallen from the starry eyes of one of Christ's
saintly maiden-spouses, glorious under the dual crown of Virginity and
Martyrdom, and yet a mother as truly as His Own.

That swift unerring judgment of Saxham's had pointed, months ago, to some
such mental and physical collapse, as the result of shock, crowning
long-continued nervous overstrain. He had said to the Mother that such a
result would be easier to avert than to deal with.

There was not an ounce of energy the man possessed that he did not employ
in dealing with it now.

Let Sister Tobias tell us, as she told Saxham then, the story of the
Finding. She was always a plain woman of few words.

"The last charge the Mother laid on us--Sister Hilda-Antony and me--was to
keep our eyes upon the child. The very day _it_ was done she told us, and
I saw that something had made her anxious by the look that was in her
eyes." She dried her own with a coarse blue cotton handkerchief before she
took up her tale. "She went alone to the Head Hospital that day. None of
us were to be surprised, she said, if she came home extra late. Sister
Hilda-Antony and me were on duty at the Railway Institute. We took Lynette
with us.--There!... Didn't she look up, just for the one second, as if she
remembered her name?"

She had not done so at all. She was sitting on her stool in her old corner
of the Convent bombproof, but she did not heed the shattering crashes of
the bombardment any more. She had only moved to push out of her eyes the
dulled and faded hair that the Sisters could not keep pinned up, and bent
over her little slate again. Before that, and a pencil had been given her
she had been restless and uneasy. Now she would be occupied for long
hours, making rude attempts at drawing houses and figures such as a child
represents,