nt seven-pounders of her batteries had
banged and grumbled, her Maxims had rattled defiance from Kopje Fort, and
the Nordenfelt released its showers of effective, death-dealing little
projectiles. Scant news from outside trickled into the town. Grumer, with
his Brigade, was guarding the Drifts, and when the Relief might be
expected was now a moss-grown topic of general conversation in
Gueldersdorp.

And within her girdle of trenches, stern, grimy, haggard men lived, cheek
to the heated rifle-breech, and ate, and snatched brief spells of sleep,
booted and bandoliered, and with the loaded weapon ready for gripping.
Since the attack on Maxim Kopje had choked the Hospital with wounded men
and dotted the Cemetery with little white crosses, nothing of much note
had occurred. The armoured train had done good service, and the Baraland
Rifle Volunteers had carried out their surprise against the enemy's
western camp one fine dark night, helped by a squadron of the Irregulars,
with eleven wounded, and the loss of six out of fifty fighting-men.

The Convent of the Holy Way stood empty and deserted in its
shrapnel-littered garden-enclosure.

From east, west, north, and south the deadly iron messengers had come,
making sore havoc of this poor house of Christ. "When the walls fall about
our ears, Colonel," the Mother-Superior had declared, "it will be time to
leave them." They were lacework now, with a confusion of bare rafters
overhead, over which streamed, as if in mockery, the Red-Cross Flag. Grim
figures, like geometrical problems gone mad, were made by water and gas
pipes torn from their bedding, and twisted as if by the hands of giants in
cruel play. The little iron bedsteads of the Sisters, and the holy symbols
over them, were the only articles missing from the cells, revealed in
section by the huge gaps in the masonry.

The Tabernacle of the chapel altar, void of the Unspeakable Mystery it had
housed, fluttered its rearward curtains through the wreckage of the east
wall and the cheap little stained-glass window, where the Shepherds and
the Magi had bowed before the Virgin Mother and the Divine Child. Within
sight of their ruined home, the Sisterhood had found refuge. An
underground dwelling had been dug for them in the garden before an
abandoned soft-brick-and-corrugated-iron house, formerly inhabited by one
of the head officials of the railway, a personage of Dutch extraction and
Boer sympathies, at present sequestered ben