then rested on one other
face there.

Its wild white-rose fairness had dulled into the pallor of old ivory.
There were deep, bluish shadows about the eyes and round the mouth, and
the hollow at the base of the throat, where the pulse throbbed and
fluttered visibly, had grown deep. Her red-brown hair had lost its
burnished beauty. It had become dull like her skin, and her garments hung
loosely upon the form whose soft roundnesses had fallen away. But her eyes
had changed most. Their golden-hazel irises had faded to pale bronze, the
full, fair eyelids had shrunk, the pupils were distended to twice their
natural size. She sat upon a stool in a corner, a slight girlish figure in
a holland skirt and white cambric blouse-bodice, her slender waist
girdled with a belt of brown leather, the colour of her little shoes.
Huddled up against the corrugated-iron wainscot of the rough earth wall,
the obsession of fear that dilated her eyes and parched her lips shook her
in recurrent gusts of trembling, whenever the guns of the Gueldersdorp
batteries spoke in thunder, whenever the Boer artillery bellowed Death
from the heights above. For since the great gun had spoken from East
Point, Death's red sickle had not ceased to ply its task.

Some work, one of the coarse canvas haversacks made by the nuns for
Gueldersdorp's enrolled defenders, lay at the girl's feet. Her right hand,
horrible to see in its incessant, mechanical activity, made continually
the motion of sewing. Her eyes stared blankly, unwinkingly at the opposite
wall, and the gusts of trembling went over her without cessation. At a
more deafening crash than ordinary, an irrepressible scream would break
from her, and her hand would snatch at an invisible garment as though she
plucked back its imaginary wearer from peril by main force.

"She sees nobody. She hear nozing when we speak--she vould feel nozing, if
you should pinch or shake her. Was I not right, Reverend Mozer, to say it
is time zat somesing should be done?"

The shrill whisper came from Sister Cleophee. The Mother-Superior made a
sign in assent. Beyond words, her heart was crying--Oh, misery and joy in
one mingled draught to have won such love as this from Richard's child!
But her face was impassive and stern, and her eyes, looking over Saxham's
great shoulder as he stood silently watching at the bottom of the ladder
stairway, imposed silence on the busy, observant, tactful Sisters, who
continued their labours wit