ed at the thing he had been.

"I felt glad," he lied, with looks that shunned Lynette's, "that in your
need you found so good a friend as the Mother-Superior. Yours must have
been a sorrowful, lonely childhood."

Her own vision rose before her, blotting out his face. She saw the little
kopje with the grave at its foot. She saw a ragged child sitting there
watching for the earliest flush of dawn or the solemn folding of night's
wide wing over the lonely veld, and the coming of the great white
stars....

"She is much, much more than a friend. She is the Mother." Her loyal heart
was in her face. "I have no secrets from her. I tell her everything."

Was that deeper flush born of the remembrance of a secret unshared? And
how strange that every change of colour and expression in the delicate
face should mean so much, so soon. He said, with a hungry flash of the
gentian-blue eyes:

"Your love and confidence repay her richly."

"I can do so little." There was an anxious fold between the slender
eyebrows. "Only follow her and be near her; only look on as she spends
herself for others, never resting, never sparing, never discouraged or
cast down." Great tears brimmed the white, darkly-fringed underlids, and
ran over. "And she only laughs at me at night when I cry at the sight of
her dear, blistered feet."

"You will be able to laugh with her when this is over," Saxham said rather
clumsily.

"Shall I? Perhaps." Still that fold between the fine, delicate eyebrows.

"You have seen War," Saxham went on, his own voice sounding strange to
him. "And that is a terrible experience for a woman, young or old, but you
will be the richer by it in the end, believe me, Miss Mildare. Richer in
courage and endurance and calmness in the presence of danger and death,
and in sympathy with the pain and suffering inevitable under such
circumstances."

"Sympathy? They had all my sympathy before." Her fair throat swelled
against its encircling band of moss-green velvet, her voice rang, her eyes
flashed golden fire under the shadow of the wide straw hat. "Do you think
it needed War to teach me how hideously women suffer? How they have
suffered since the world began, and how they will suffer until its end,
unless they rise up in revolt once for all, against the wickedness of
men?"

She was transformed under Saxham's eyes. The slender virginal body
increased in stature and proportions as he gazed, and what obscure
emotions seemed striving in