his
mate. "Chuck some water over the young woman, one of you," he added, as
the stretcher was lifted. "And tell her, when she comes to, that we've
taken her sweetheart to Hospital instead of to the other place."

"Rum critters, women," commented another bystander, not untender in his
manner of sprinkling the dubious liquid known in Gueldersdorp as water out
of a cracked tin dipper over the face of the young woman who sat upon the
ground in the centre of a circular palisade of interested human legs.
"Look at this one, for instance. Lively as a vink as long as she believes
her chap a corpse, and does a solid flop as soon as she finds out he has a
kick in him. Help her up, you on the other side. Do you think you could
walk now, miss, if you tried to?"

She made a faltering attempt, but her knees shook under her. Her clasped
hands shook, too, as she held them out, beseeching those about her to be
pitiful, and tell her where "they" had taken him. Then, when she was told,
and because she was too weak and dazed to walk, she ran all the way to the
Hospital, and volunteered to nurse him.

Saxham stitched up the split scalp of W. Keyse, and grimly congratulated
him upon the thickness of the skull beneath it. The bullet had, as has
already been indicated, gone in under the left nostril, and emerged below
the inner corner of the right eye, gaining the recipient of the wound
notoriety as well as a strong temporary snuffle and a slight permanent
cast....

"You shall git well, deer," Emigration Jane would tell her patient twenty
times a day. "You carn't 'elp it, becos I means to myke you."

"A' right," her hero would snuffle. One day he added, with a weakly swoop
of one lean arm in the direction of her waist: "Mend me an' marry me.
That's wot I call a Fair Division o' Labour. Twig?"

She crimsoned, gasping:

"You don't never mean it?"

"Stryte I mean it," declared W. Keyse. "Wot d'you tyke me for?"

His bed was in a corner, and a screen baffled prying eyes. She hung over
him, trembling, ardent, doubting, joyful, faltering:

"S'y it agyne, darlin'! Upon yer solemn natural----"

He said it with the lean arm round her.

"An' it's me--me wot you wants--an' not that Other One?----"

He swore it.

"You and not that Other One. So help me Jiminy Cripps!"

"An' you've forgiven me--abart them letters?" Her face was coming
close....

"Every time I blooming well kissed 'em, arter I bin an' picked 'em up," he
declared.

"You