st love away.

His pale, unbeautiful eyes had the anguish of despair in them, and the
tooth of that sharp death-hunger of which Kildare had spoken was gnawing
what he would have termed with simplicity "his inside." For if Emigration
Jane were dead, what had Life left for him?

After his first superb assumption of cold indifference had broken down he
had sought her, feverishly at first, then doggedly, then with a dizzy
sickness of terror and apprehension that made the letters of the
type-written casualty-lists posted outside the Staff Headquarters in the
Market Square turn apparent somersaults as he strove to read them. This
was his punishment, that he should hunger as she had hungered, and still
be disappointed, and learn by fellowship in keenest suffering what her
pain had been.

The "Fare Air" letters were some comfort. In the trench at night, when
fever and rheumatism kept him from the dog-sleep that other men were
snatching, he would hear her crying over and over: "Oh, cruel, to break a
poor girl's heart!" And when sleep came he would track her through strange
places, calling her to come back--to come back and be forgiven. And when
he awakened from such dreams there would be tears upon his face. And each
day he consulted the lists of killed and wounded, and once had staggered
white-lipped to the mortuary-shed to identify a Jane Harris, and found
her--oh, with what unutterable relief!--to be a coloured lady who had
married a Rifleman. After that he had perked up, and continued his quest
for the beloved needle lost in the haystack of Gueldersdorp with renewed
belief in the ultimate possibility of finding it. Then, in the middle of
one awful night, the darkness of his mental state had been luridly
illuminated by the conviction that she had joined Slabberts. Now strange
voices whispered always in his ears, saying that she was dead, and urging
him to follow by the same dark road over which her trembling feet had
stumbled.

He heard those voices as he wrought and sweated with the gun-team at the
levers, and the ponderous muzzle-loader rolled back upon the grooves of
her improvised mounting. He heard it as they sponged the antique monster
out, and fed it with a three-pound bolus of cordite, and a ten-pound ball
of ancient pattern with the date of 1770. He heard it now again as he
kneeled at a loophole in the parapet, watching Saxham. Those pale, ugly
eyes of Billy Keyse were extraordinarily keen. He saw a grimy hand
ca