of the blushing face, wetted with
streaming tears from the wide bright eyes that pleaded so. They were blue,
too, and the fringe above them might, by a not too exhausting stretch of
the imagination, be termed golden. He heard her voice crying to him, "How
can you, can you?" And he trembled at the thought of the mouth that kissed
and clung.

He had known bought kisses, of the kind that brand the lips and shame the
buyer as the seller. Never the kiss of Love, until now.

And now--was any other worth the taking?

"Cr'ripps!" said W. Keyse. "Not much!"

XXXII

It was Wednesday again, and Saxham came riding through the embrasure in
the oblong earthwork, and down the gravelly glacis that led into the
Women's Laager. An obsequious Hindu, in an unclean shirt and a filthy red
turban, rose up salaaming, almost under his horse's feet, and took the
bridle. He dismounted and went his rounds.

It might have been the dry bed of a high-banked placer-river, with spare
lengths of steel railway-line borne across from bank to bank, covered with
beams and sheets of corrugated iron and tarpaulins, with wide chinks to
let in the much-needed air and light. A line of living-waggons, crowded
with women and children--English, American, Irish, Dutch, and
half-caste--ran down the centre of the giant trench. In each of its
sloping faces a row of dug-out habitations gave accommodation to twice the
number that the waggons held. At the eastern end a line of camp
cooking-places had been arranged in military fashion, but the Dutchwomen's
little coffee-pipkin-bearing fires of dung and chips burned everywhere,
and possibly they did something towards purifying the air. For, to be
frank, it vied with the native village in the compound and variegated
nature of its smells, without the African muskiness of odour that is
perceptible in the vicinity of our sable brother. The fat, slatternly,
frankly dirty vrouws had not the remotest idea of sanitation; the Germans
and Irish, blandly or doggedly impervious to savage smells, pursued their
unsavoury way in defiance of the clamorous necessity for hygienic
measures, until the majority of the pallid, untidy, scared Englishwomen,
the energetic Americans, and the sturdier Africanders, after making what
headway was possible against the ever-rising tide of filth, had yielded to
the lethargy bred of despair and lack of exercise, and ceased to strive. A
few, worthy of honour, still stoutly battled with the demo