ucketful, a bath a
rare luxury when the contents of the said bucket might be spilled or
thrown away in the course of the gymnastics wherewith the sable or
coffee-brown bearer sought to evade the travelling unexploded shell or the
fan-shaped charge of shrapnel. Therefore, the Sisters had turned
laundry-women. You could hear the sound of Sister Tobias's smoothing-iron
coming up from below, thump-thumping on the blanketed board.

"And where do you think we get the water, now?" the rosy Sister, in
process of being packed into the spider, leaned over the wheel to ask.

"Not from the Convent?" Saxham thought of the strip of veld between there
and the Hospital, even more fraught with peril than the patch he had just
traversed, or the distance yet to be covered between the Sisters'
bombproof and the Women's Laager, where Death, with the red sickle in his
fleshless hand, stalked openly from dawn to nightfall.

"From the Convent, carrying it across after dark. And no well there,
either, that you'd get the fill of a teaspoon out of"--a "tayspoon" it was
in the rosy Sister's Dublin brogue--"and yet there's water there."

"But how----" Saxham began. The Mother-Superior shook her head, and the
rosy Sister was silent.

"There is no mystery about the water at all. It is very simple." Standing
there with her head held high and the fine, free, graceful lines of her
tall figure outlined by the heavy folds of the now worn and darned black
habit, and her hands, still beautiful, though roughened by toil, calmly
folded upon her scapular, she was as remarkable and noble a figure, it
seemed to Saxham, as the golden sunlight could fall upon anywhere in the
world. And besides, she was his right hand at the Hospital. A capable,
watchful, untiring nurse--and beauty would have decked her in his
surgeon's eyes if she had been physically ugly or deformed.

"There is no mystery whatever, only when the bombardment first began I
thought of the waterworks, and that one of my first cares, supposing I had
been General Brounckers"--she smiled slightly--"would have been to operate
there. So I set the Sisters to work at filling every empty barrel and
bucket and tub in the Convent with water from the taps. And as we happened
to have plenty of empty barrels and tubs, why, there is water to be had
there now, and will be for some time to come. Go now, my children."

The smiling Sisters waved their hands. The orderly saluted with his whip
and drove on in obed