knows! I've bin 'omesick--fair old 'omesick for a sniffer of the very
plyce I was 'oppin' with 'appiness to git away out of four months back.
Good old Gueldersdorp!" He winked the wet out of his eyes and pointed to
Mrs. Keyse with his elbow. "An' look at 'er! Doin' a blub on the strength
of it! That's wot it is to be a woman! Ain't it, sir?"

Saxham's keen glance took in the altered shape of the thin girl in the
mended jacket and the large and feathered hat that topped the colossal
structure of fair, frizzled hair, even as she dried her eyes with a
twopenny handkerchief edged with cotton lace, and tried to laugh. He took
the lean chin of W. Keyse between his white, strong, supple fingers, and
turned the triangular, hollow-cheeked face to the light, and said,
touching the little round blue scar left by the enemy's bullet at the
angle of the wide left nostril and the other mark of its egress below the
inner corner of the right eye:

"You found out what a woman can be, my man, when she helped to nurse you
at the Hospital."

"Gawd knows I did!" affirmed W. Keyse. "An' since she's bin' my wife----"
The prominent Adam's apple in his thin throat jerked. He gulped a sob down
as he looked at her. And the red flew up in her pale cheeks, and in her
eyes, as she returned the look of him, her master and her mate, there
shone the answering light of love. And Saxham's face darkened with angry
blood, and his strong, supple surgeon's hand clenched with the savage
impulse to dash itself in the face of this ragged, seedy, out-at-elbows
Millionaire who flaunted riches in the face of his own beggary.

Never, never would a woman's eyes kindle with that sweet fire in answer to
the challenge of his own! Empty, empty the heart whose chambers were swept
and decked and garlanded for a guest who never came! Lonely, lonely,
desolate this life lived within sound of her, sight of her, touch of
her--dearer inexpressibly than ever woman was yet to man!

He had said to her: "But come to me, and I shall be content--even happy.
Live under my roof, take the shelter of my name--I ask no more!"

He asked more in the lonely nights that would never be companioned, in the
silence that would never be broken by Love's whisper or Love's kiss. He
was not content; his craving for her fretted the flesh from his bones and
gnawed his heart like some voracious, sharp-fanged, predatory animal.
Happy--was he? Happy as one who sits beside a stream of living water and