; and another for the
Chief, sayin'--he read it to me--that she'd gone to retrieve the Past,
with a capital 'P,' and hoped to convince him ere long that one of her
_despised sex_--underlined, 'despised sex'--can be useful to her country."

"'Can be useful to her country,'" repeats Beauvayse "Question is, in what
way?"

"Damme if I can imagine!" bursts explosively from the deserted husband.
"All I know up to date, and all _you_ know, is that before it was quite
light she drove out of our lines in Nixey's spider, his mouse-coloured
trotter pullin', and her German maid sittin' behind, wavin' a white towel
tied to the end of a walkin'-stick of mine, and went straight over to the
enemy. We hear in the course of things from a Kaffir despatch-runner that
she's stayin' in a hotel of sorts at Tweipans, where Brounckers has had
his headquarters since he shifted Chief Laager from Geitfontein. And for
any further information we may knock our rotten heads against a brick wall
and twiddle our thumbs. Never you marry, Toby, my boy!"

A V-shaped vein swells and darkens between the handsome grey-green eyes
and on the broad forehead, white as a girl's where the sun-tan leaves off.
Beauvayse takes his cigar again from his mouth, and knocks the ash off
deliberately before he responds:

"Thanks for the advice."

"Be warned," says Captain Bingo sententiously, "by me. Know when you're
well off, as I didn't. Take the advice of your seniors, as I was too
pig-headed a fool to do, and don't put it in the power of any woman to
make you as rottenly wretched as I am at this minute."

"Why! women _can_ make you rottenly wretched," admits Beauvayse, with a
confirmatory creak of the bamboo chair. "But, on the other hand, they can
make you awfully happy--what?"

Captain Bingo throws his long legs off their resting-place, and sits
sideways, staring rather owlishly at his young friend. He shakes his head
in a dismal way several times, and sucks hard at his cigar as he shakes
it.

"For a bit, but does it last? When I came down to hunt you up last June at
the cottage at Cookham----"

"Look here, old man!" The bamboo chair creaks angrily as Beauvayse in his
turn sits up and drops his own long legs on either side of it, and drives
the foot-rest back under the table seat with a vicious punch. "Don't
remind me of the cottage at Cookham, will you? It's one of the things I
want to forget just now."

"You were as proud as Punch of it last June. Have yo