set up,
and worshipped, and bowed down before, calling it The Omnipotent Human
Will.

She rose by-and-by, and stood with clasped hands, thinking. It was very
still, and the air was sweet and balmy, and beyond the lines of the
defence-works miles upon miles of sunlit veld rolled away to the hills
that were mantled in clear hyacinth-colour and hooded with pale rose.

"If I married you, you would take me away from this country and these
people who have killed her?"

She had the thought of another in her heart and the name of another upon
her lips. But only her eyes spoke, travelling to that more distant grave
where the butterflies were hovering above the flowers, as Saxham answered:

"I would take you away, if you wished it."

"To England?"

"Back to England."

"I should see London, and the house where Mother lived...." She seemed to
have forgotten Saxham, and to be uttering her thoughts aloud. "I might
even see the green mountains of Connemara in Ireland--her own mountains
she used to call them. I might one day meet people who are of her blood
and name----"

"And of _his_," thought Saxham, following her eyes' wistful journey to
that other grave.

"But," she went on, "it would all depend"--she breathed with agitation and
knitted her slim white fingers together, and looked round at him with that
anxious wrinkle between her fine eyebrows--"upon how much you asked of me!
Suppose I----" His intent and burning eyes confused her, and she dropped
her own beneath them. "If I were to marry you, would you leave me
absolutely free?"

"Absolutely," said Saxham. "With the most complete freedom a wife could
possibly desire."

"I meant--a different kind of freedom from a wife's." She knitted and
unknitted her hands. "It is difficult to explain. Would you be willing to
ask nothing of me that a friend or a sister might not give? Would you be
content----"

Her transparent skin glowed crimson with the rush of blood. Her bosom
laboured with the hurry of her breathing. Her white lids veiled her eyes,
or the sudden terrible change in Saxham's face might have wrung from her a
cry of terror and alarm. But he mastered the raging jealousy that tore
him, and said, with a jarring note of savage irony in the voice that had
always spoken to her gently until then:

"Would I be content to enter, with you for my partner, into a marriage
that should be practically no marriage at all--a formal contract that is
not wedlock? That might neve