able and the upright and the cleanly among men for
ever!"

And now ... his thoughts were tipped with fire as he drank in the
suddenly-awakened, vivid, delicate beauty of Lynette Mildare. Now he
realised the depths of his own mad folly. Oh, to have had the right to
hope again, to love again, to live again, and be grateful to David, who
had betrayed him, and Mildred, who had deserted him--to this end! Oh,
never to have lost the honourable claim to woo such loveliness as this and
win such purity, and wear both as a talisman upon his heart for ever! He
drew breath heavily as he looked at the girl, transformed and glowing
under the touch she loved, shining from within like some frail,
transparent alabaster lamp with the light that he had helped to rekindle.
And as his great chest expanded with deep draughts of the subtle,
intoxicating atmosphere of her, and the blood hummed through his veins to
that new measure, the last link of his old fetters fell clanking to the
ground. And then, with a sting of intolerable remorse, came the memory of
his shameful five years' Odyssey spent as a hog among other hogs of the
human kind. It had not been an overthrow. It had been a surrender of all
that was noble and strong in him to all in him that was despicable and
weak and vile. And his soul shuddered, and his heart contracted in the
sickening clutch of shame.

XXIX

He awakened from that lost moment of enthralment to the pang and the shock
of self-discovery, and to the knowledge that somebody was hailing him by
name from the top of the ladder.

"Saxham! Doctor! Are you below there?"

It was the gay, fresh voice of Beauvayse, halted with a handful of
Irregulars, bandoliered, carrying their rifles and the day's provisions,
wearing their bayonets on their hips, and sitting their wiry little horses
with the ease of old troopers in the lee-side of the piled-up mound of
sandbags that roofed the underground convent. Five men and a Corporal of
the Town Guard, similarly burdened and accoutred--we know the pale Cockney
eyes and the thin face of the Corporal, whose freckles have long ago
vanished in a uniform gingerbread hue--had also taken momentary shelter
from one of the intermittent blizzards of Mauser bullets that drifted
through Gueldersdorp.

One Irregular was sitting on an earth-filled packing-case, swearing
softly, nursing a disabled right arm, and looking at the corded network of
hairy, sunburned muscles that were delicately