rs. It takes us the whole day once we get
there."

Saxham dismounted as she stooped to seize the end of a blue cotton-covered
washing-basket impelled from below by an ascending Sister. The spider
pulled up under cover of the brick-and-corrugated-iron house vacated by
the railway-official, as another short storm of riflery cracked and
rattled among the eastern foothills, and a whistling hurry of the
sharp-nosed little messengers of death passed through Gueldersdorp. Some
of them hit and flattened on the gable of the railway-official's house,
one went through the leathern splashboard of the spider. Saxham moved
instinctively to place himself between the closely-standing group of nuns
and possible danger.

"No, no!" they cried, as one woman, their placid, cheerful tones taking a
shade of anxiety. "You must not do that!"

"I know you are all well-seasoned," he said, looking at them with the
smile that made his stern face changed and gentle.

"I am not so sure. The bullets come in the usual way of things. We take
our chance of them," the Mother-Superior answered. But she pressed her
lips together and grew pale as a faint cry came up from the subterranean
dwelling, roofed with sheets of corrugated iron laid upon steel rails, and
made bombproof with bags of earth. And Saxham, looking at the fine face,
with its worn lines of fatigue and over-exertion, and noting the deep
shadowy caves that housed the great luminous grey eyes, said:

"I think we must have you take some rest, or I shall be having my best
helper on my hands as a patient. And that won't do, you know."

"No, it would not do," she said, looking fully and seriously at him. "And
therefore I think our Lord will not permit it. But if He should, be sure
another will rise up to fill my place."

"Whoever your successor might be," said Saxham sincerely, "she would not
fulfil my ideal of an absolutely efficient nurse, as you do. So from the
personal, if not the altruistic point of view, let me beg you to be
careful."

"I take all reasonable care," she told him. "It is true, the work has been
heavy this week; but to-morrow is Sunday, and we shall rest all day and
sleep at the Convent. Indeed, some of us have taken it in turn to be on
guard there every night, or nothing would be left us."

"I understand."

He knew how prowlers and night-thieves made harvest in the darkness among
the deserted dwellings since Police and Town Guardsmen had been
requisitioned to man the