is all!"

"All?"

"All, except the sunshine, bathing everything, soaking you through and
through."

"But there is not always sunshine? It must be sometimes night?" argues
Lessie, a little peevishly.

"There are deep violet nights, full of great white stars," Lynette
answers. "There are storms of dust and rain, lightning and thunder, such
as are only read of here.... There are plots, conspiracies, raids,
robberies, murders, slumps and losses, plagues and massacres. There are
rebellions of white men, and native risings. There have been wars; there
is war to-day, and there will be war again in the days that are yet to
come!"

She has almost forgotten the little woman beside her, staring at her with
big, brown, rather animal eyes. Now she turns to her with her rare and
lovely smile:

"The war that is going on now began at the little village-town where I was
a Convent schoolgirl. We were shut for months within the lines. But, of
course, you have read the newspaper accounts of the Siege of Gueldersdorp?
I am only telling you what you know!"

Lessie laughs, and the laugh has the hard, unpleasant, mirthless little
tinkle of a toy dog's collar-bell, or bits of crushed ice rattled in a
champagne-glass.

"What I have good reason to know!"

Her podgy, jewelled hands are clenching and unclenching in her heliotrope
chiffon lap; there is a well-defined scowl between the black arched
eyebrows, and the murky light of battle gleams in the eyes that no longer
languish between their bistred eyelids as she scans the pure pale face
under the sweep of her heavily blackened lashes. She would almost give the
ruby buttons out of her ears to see it wince and quiver, and crimson into
angry blushes. And yet Lessie is rather amiable than otherwise in her
attitude towards other women. True, she has never before met one who had
the insolence to pity her to her face.

"So quite too interesting!" she says, with an exaggerated affectation of
amiability, and in high, fashionable accents, "you having been at
Gueldersdorp through the Siege and all. Were you ever--I suppose you must
have been sometimes--shot at with a gun?"

The faintest quiver of a smile comes over the lovely face her grudging
eyes are trying to find a flaw in.

"Often when I have been crossing the veld between the town and the
Hospital, the Mauser bullets have hummed past like bees, or raised little
spurts of dust close by my feet where they had hit the ground. And once a