e is dear to me. And
now I shall ask you to leave us. Please tell the Sisters"--from habit she
glanced at her worn gold watch--"we shall join them in ten minutes' time."

He bowed, and lifted his smasher hat from the grass, and took up the
Lee-Metford carbine he had been carrying and had laid aside, and went to
Lynette and took her passive hand, and bent over it and kissed it. It
dropped by her side lifelessly when he released it. Her face was a mask
void of life. He looked towards the Mother in distress. Her white hand
imperiously motioned him away. He expostulated:

"Is it safe for two ladies, ma'am, so far from the town, without
protection? Natives or white loafers may be hanging about."

"If you desire it, you can remain within hearing of a call. But go now."

He went, lightly striding down the sandy path between the reed-beds on the
foreshore. She watched the tall, athletic figure until it swung round a
bend and was lost to sight.

Then she went to the girl and touched her. And at the touch Lynette
dropped as though she had been shot, and lay among the trodden grasses and
the flaunting cowslips face downwards. A low, incessant moaning came from
the muffled mouth. Her hands were knotted in her hair. She writhed like a
crushed snake, and all of her slender neck and face that could be seen and
the little ears that her clutching, twining fingers sometimes bared and
sometimes covered were one burning, shameful red.

"Lynette! My dear one!" The Mother, wrung and torn with a very agony of
tenderness and pity, knelt beside her, and began with gentle strength to
untwine those clutching hands from the girl's hair. She prisoned both in
one of hers, and passed the other arm beneath the slender rigid body, and
lifted it up and held it in her strong embrace, silently until a moan,
more articulate than the rest, voiced:

"Mother!"

"It is Mother. She holds you; she will not let you go."

The head lay helplessly upon her bosom. She felt the rigor lessen. The
moaning ceased, and the tortured heart began to leap and strain against
her own, as though some invisible hand lashed it with an unseen thong.

There were no tears. Only those moans and the leaping of the heart that
shook her whole body. And it seemed to the Mother that her own heart wept
tears of blood. The hour had come at last, as always she had known it
would. The love of a man had wakened the woman in Lynette. She knew now
the full value of the lost heritage, an