ank you, Miss Mildare. You are not alone here?"

Her glad smile assured him of that. "Oh no, I am with the Mother. I go
everywhere with her, and I think I am of use. I am not at all afraid of
sickness, you know, or--the other things."

"But yet," Saxham said, "you must be careful of your health."

"You have no idea how tremendously strong I am," she answered him, and he
broke into laughter in spite of himself. She looked so tender, so
delicately frail a creature to be there in that malodorous Gehenna,
ministering to the wants of slatternly vrouws and stalwart, down-at-heel
Irishwomen. His smile emboldened her to say: "I did not thank you the
other day, after all."

"The Krupp shell came along and changed the subject of the conversation."
He added: "Were you alarmed? You had rather an escape."

"I was with Mother."

"You love her very dearly?" The words had escaped him unconsciously. They
were his spoken thought. She flushed, and said with a thrill of tenderness
in her clear girlish tones:

"More dearly than it is possible to say. I don't believe God Himself will
be angry with me that I have always seen His Face and Our Blessed Lady's
shining through hers and beyond it; for He knows as no one else can ever
know what she has been since they brought me to the Convent years and
years ago."

"They" were her people, presumably. It was odd--Saxham supposed it the
outcome of that Convent breeding--that she should speak of God as simply,
to quote Gladstone's criticism on the Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff, as
though He were her grandfather. Saxham had been reared in the Christian
faith by a pious Welsh mother, but there had always been a little
awkwardness about domestic references to the Deity. In times of sadness or
bereavement He was frequently referred to. But always in a deprecatory
tone.

"Your family is not Colonial?" he asked.

She shook her lovely red-brown head.

"I--don't know."

"Mildare is an unusual surname."

"You think it pretty?"

He thought her very pretty as she stood there, a slender willowy creature
with the golden shadow of her rough straw-hat intensifying the clear amber
of her thoughtful eyes.

"Very."

She looked him in the face and smiled.

"So did I when the Mother gave it to me. I think it belonged to someone
she used to know, and her mother was Lynette. So they baptised me Lynette
Mildare. It seems rather strange not having a name of one's own, but
really I never had one."

"N