m
broke from Lynette.

"Oh, Mother, who ...?"

"It is a Town Guardsman," Saxham answered, his cold blue eyes meeting the
wild frightened gaze of the pale girl. "Lord Beauvayse and the Irregulars
got off scot-free. Reverend Mother, do not think of coming. Please go on
to the Women's Laager. I will see to the wounded man, and follow
by-and-by."

He mounted, refusing all offers of aid, and rode off. Looking back an
instant, he saw the black figure of the woman and the white figure of the
girl setting out upon their perilous journey over the bare patch of ground
where Death made harvest every day. They kissed each other before they
started, and again Saxham thought of Ruth and Naomi. If Ruth had been only
one half as lovely as this Convent-grown lily, Boaz was decidedly a lucky
man. But he had been a respectable, sober, steady-going farmer, and not a
man of thirty-six without a ten-pound note in the world, with a blighted
career to regret, and five years of drunken wastrelhood to be ashamed of.
And yet ... the drunken wastrel had been a man of mark once, and earned
his thousands. And the success that had been achieved, and lost, could be
rewon, and the career that had been pursued and abandoned could be
his--Saxham's--again. And what were his publishers doing with those
accumulated royalties? For he knew from Taggart and McFadyen that his
books still sold.

"The Past is done with," he said aloud. "Why should not the Future be
fair?"

And yet he had nearly yielded to the impulse to own to those degraded
years, and claim the nickname they had earned him, and take her loathing
and contempt in exchange. What sudden madness had possessed him, akin to
that unaccountable, overmastering surge of emotion that he had known just
now when he saw her tears?

We know the name of the divine madness, but we know not why it comes.
Suddenly, after long years, in a crowded place or in a solitude where two
are, it is upon you or upon me. The blood is changed to strange, ethereal
ichor, the pulse beats a tune that is as old as the Earth itself, but yet
eternally new. Every breath we draw is rapture, every step we take leads
us one way. One voice calls through all the voices, one hand beckons
whether it will or no, and we follow because we must. With the Atlantic
rolling between us I can feel your heart beat against mine, and your lips
breathe into me your soul. The light that was upon your face, the look
that was in your eyes as you gav