ue eyes of Miss Greta Du Taine had
vanished out of Gueldersdorp before the first Act of War. He would have
felt them in the way now. Those shining, tearful eyes and the mouth that
kissed and clung to his had done their work on the night of the Grand
Variety entertainment in the empty Government store. He would pretend to
go away and leave her. He would come back, enjoy her astonishment, be
melted by renewed entreaties, stoop to relent, overwhelm her with his
magnanimity, and then proceed to love-making.

But as a preliminary he swung round upon his heel and strode upwards
through the short bush and the tall grasses, the scandalised flowers
thrashing his boots. She saw him, although her back was turned. If he
could have known how tall he seemed to Emigration Jane as he strode away,
W. Keyse would have been tickled to the core. But he turned when he felt
sure he was well out of sight, and hurried back.

She was not there.

He was indifferent at first, then angry, then anxious, then disconsolate.
Repentance followed fast on the heels of all these moods. He picked up the
packet of letters and the rejected pipe, cursing his own cruelty, and
sought her up and down the banks, calling her in tones that were urgent,
affectionate, upbraiding, appealing; but not for all his luring would the
flown bird come back to fist. No more beside the river, or in other places
where they had been wont to meet, did W. Keyse encounter Emigration Jane
again.

XXXIX

But even without W. Keyse and the vanished author of "Fare Air's" letters
the ferny tree-fringed kloof at the bottom of which the beer-coloured
river ran over its granite boulders and quartz pebbles, was not empty and
void. On Sundays, when the birds returned from the hills, to which they
had been scared by the hideous tumult of War, thither after High Mass in
the battered little Roman Catholic church in the stad, the Mother-Superior
and the Sisters would come, bringing with them such poor food as they had,
and picnic soberly. All the week through they had laboured, nursed, and
tended the sick and wounded in the Hospitals, and washed and fed and
taught the numberless orphans of the siege, and upon this day the
Mother-Superior had ruled that they were to be together. And all the week
through the thought of it kept them going, as she had hoped. You are to
see her holding her little court beside the river upon a certain February
afternoon, receiving friends in her sweet, sta