ntered for the second Spring Meeting at Newmarket, and the merits
of the problem play, and the newest farcical comedy--the Immortality of
the Soul.

She wore a brown velvet gown and an ostrich-feather boa in delicate shades
of cream and brown, and a cavalier hat with sweeping white plumes. Her
hair was the colour of autumn leaves, or a squirrel's back in the
sunshine, and she had grey eyes and piquant, irregular features, ears like
shells, and a delicate, softly-tinted skin undefiled by cosmetics. She
thought it wicked to doubt that one waked up again after dying,
Somewhere--a vague Somewhere, with all the nice people of one's set about
one. He said that Agnosticism and all that kind of thing was bad form. Men
who had religion made the best soldiers. Like the Presbyterian Highlanders
of the Black Watch and the "Royal Irish" Catholics--but, of course, she
knew that. And she said yes, she knew; meeting his admiring eyes with her
own, that were so grey and sweet and friendly, the little gloved hand that
held the ivory and gold-bound Church Service lying in her lap. He longed
to take that little white, delicate hand. Later on he took it, and a
little later the heart that throbbed in its pulses, and the frail,
beautiful body out of which the something that had been she had gone with
a brief gasping struggle and a long shuddering sigh....

He kept the beloved husk and shell of her steady on the waggon-bed with
one arm thrown over it, and held the awakened, fretting child against his
breast with the other, as the sinking oxen floundered up the farther side
of the kloof. Amidst the shouting and cursing of the native voor-loopers
and the Boer and Kaffir drivers, the rain of blows on tortured, struggling
bodies, and the creaking of the teak-built waggon-frames, he only heard
her weakly asking to be buried properly in some churchyard, or cemetery,
with a clergyman to read the Service for the Dead.

Before his field-glass showed him the sprawling hotel-sign he had hoped
that the buildings in sight might prove to mask the outskirts of a native
village with an English missionary station, or a Dutch settlement
important enough to own a corrugated iron Dopper church and an
oak-scrub-hedged or boulder-dyked graveyard, in charge of a pastor whose
loathing of the Briton should yield to the mollifying of poured-out gold.

But Fate had brought him to this lonely veld tavern. He watched it growing
into ugly, sordid shape as the waggon drew