lined with what has been the last new fashionable
colour under twenty names, since then; only that year they called it _Rose
fane_. Richard Mildare had praised the sunshade, a Paris affair supplied
by Worth with his creation, Lady Biddy Bawne's beautiful gown. He asked
Lady Biddy to marry him at the back of the box on the Grand Stand when
Verneuil was winning the Cup. Who shall dare say that he was not then a
sincere lover? thought the Mother-Superior of the Convent of the Holy Way.
And then she recalled her wandering thoughts, and turned them to the One
Lover who never betrays His chosen. And her rapt eyes looking up, seemed
to pierce beyond the flaming sky-vault overhead. She forgot all else,
suddenly snatched from earthly consciousness to beatific realisation of
the Divine.

There had been for some minutes now a lull in the bombardment from the
ridges. The enemy's guns were silent a space, and the hot batteries of
harassed Gueldersdorp snatched a brief respite while Boers gathered for
the nine o'clock coffee-drinking round their little snapping fires of
dried dung and tindery bush. Now and then a rifle cracked, and a bullet
sang past or whitted in the dust. But comparative peace brooded over the
shattered hamlet of wrecked homes and ploughed-up, littered roads, and raw
earthworks blistering in the pitiless sun.

"Miss Mildare." Beauvayse was speaking in that pleasant, boyish voice of
his, standing close to Lynette, his tall head bending for a glimpse of the
eyes of golden hazel, that were shaded by the broad, rough straw hat; "if
you knew how I've waited for this. Nearly seven weeks since one day in
early October, when I saw you on the Recreation Ground, where some brutes
were annoying you, and a day or so later you went by the Hospital as I
rode up with the Chief. But, of course, you don't remember?" His eyes
begged her to say she did.

"I remember quite well." It was the voice he had imagined for her--low,
and round, and clear, with just an undernote of plaintiveness matching the
wistful appeal of her eyes. At the first sound of it a shudder of
exquisite delight went through him, as though she had touched him with her
slender white, bare hand on the naked breast.

"Thank you for not quite forgetting. You don't know what it means to me,
being kept in mind by you."

"I do not know that I kept you in mind." There was a touch of girlish
dignity in her utterance. "I only said that I remembered quite well."

He ben