orse and the man again, and exclaimed:

"Why ... Mother, don't you remember the rearing horse outside the Hospital
that day in October? It was Dr. Saxham who caught him, and saved us from
getting hurt."

"And we never even thanked you." The Mother-Superior turned to Saxham with
outstretched hand and the smile that made her grave face beautiful. "What
you must have thought!..."

"I looked for the person who had been so prompt, but you had
vanished--where, nobody seemed to know," Lynette told him with her clear
eyes on the stern, square face. "And then a man in the crowd called out,
'It's the Dop Doctor!' And I thought what an odd nickname!..." She broke
off in dismay. Saxham had become livid. His grim jaws clamped themselves
together, and the blue eyes grew hard as stone. One instant he stood
immovable, the Waler's bridle on his left arm, his right hand clenched
upon the old hunting-crop. Then he said very coldly and distinctly:

"As you observe, it is a queer nickname. But, at any rate, I had fairly
earned----"

The bugle from the Staff headquarters sounded, drowning the rest of the
sentence. The Catholic Church bell tolled. The other bells took up the
warning, and the sentries called again from post to post:

"'Ware gun, Number Two! Southern Quarter, 'ware!"

The Krupp bellowed from the enemy's north position, and cleverly lobbed a
seven-pound shell not far behind that rapidly-moving, distant pillar of
dust, the nucleus of which was a little troop of cantering Irregulars, and
not far in front of the lower, slower-moving cloud, the heart of which was
a little knot of tramping Town Guardsmen. The shell burst with a splitting
crack, earth and flying stones mingled with the deadly green flame and the
poisonous chemical fumes of the lyddite. Figures scurried hither and
thither in the smoke and smother; one lay prone upon the ground....

At the instant of the explosion Saxham had leaped forwards, setting his
body and the horse's as a bulwark between Death and the two women. Now,
though Lynette's rough straw hat had been whisked from her head by a force
invisible, he saw her safe, caught in the Mother-Superior's embrace,
sheltered by the tall, protecting figure as the sapling is sheltered by
the pine.

"We are not hurt," the Mother protested, though her cheek had been cut by
a flying flake of flint, and was bleeding. "But look ... over there!" She
pointed over the veld to the prostrate brown figure, and a cry of alar