f the nimble sisterhood
devote their gifts--Thespian and Terpsichorean--to demonstrating the fact.
Oh, damned cowardly hounds!" The voice jarred and clanged with
irrepressible anger. "Saxham, can't you see? Brouncker's sharpshooters are
sniping at the women--the Sister of Mercy and the girl!"

His glance, as well as Saxham's, had followed the tall black figure and
the slender white figure on their journey through Death's harvest-field.
But his trained eye had been first to see the little jets and puffs of
sickly hot, reddish dust rising about their perilous path. They walked
quickly, but without hurry, keeping a pace apart, and holding one another
by the hand. Saxham, watching them, said, with dry lips and a deadly
sickness at the heart:

"And we can do nothing?"

"Nothing! It's one of those things a man has got to look on at, and wonder
why the Almighty doesn't interfere? Oh, to have the fellows triced up for
three dozen of the best apiece--good old-fashioned measure. See, they're
getting near the laager now. They'll soon be under cover. But--I wonder
the Convent cares to risk its ewe lamb on that infernal patch of veld?"

"It is my doing." Saxham's eyes were glued on the black figure and the
white figure nearing, nearing the embrasure in the earthwork redoubt, and
his face was of an ugly blue-white, and dabbled with sweat.

"Your doing?"

"Mine. I was called in, to find Miss Mildare breaking down from suspense,
and the overstrain of inaction. And--to avert even worse evils, I
prescribed the tonic of danger. There was no choice---- In at last!"

The Sister of Mercy and the girl had vanished behind the dumpy earth-bag
walls. He thought the white figure had glanced back, and waved its hand,
and then a question from his companion startled him beyond his ordinary
stolid self-control.

"By the way ... with reference to Miss Mildare, have you any idea whether
she proposes taking the veil?"

"How should I have ideas upon the possibility?" The opaque, smooth skin of
the square, pale face was dyed with a sudden rush of dark blood. The
Colonel did not look at it, but said, as a bullet sang upon a stone near
his boot, and flattened into a shiny star of lead:

"I would give something to hear you laugh sometimes, Saxham. You're too
much in earnest, my dear fellow. Burnt Njal himself could hardly have been
more grim."

Saxham answered:

"That fellow in the Saga, you mean. He laughed only at the end, I think,
when the