lain standing smiling on the threshold.

The Reverend Julius Fraithorn, no longer a worn and wasted pilgrim
stumbling amongst the thorns and sharp stones of the Valley of the Shadow,
appears in these days as a perfectly sound and healthy, if rather too
narrow-shouldered, young Anglican clergyman, not unbecomingly arrayed, in
virtue of his official position under martial authority, in a suit of
Service khaki such as Saxham wears, with the black Maltese Cross on the
collar and the band of the wide-peaked cap. Yellow puttees conceal the
unduly spare proportions of his active legs, and the brown boots upon his
long slender feet are dusty, as, indeed, is the rest of him, not with the
reddish dust of the veld that powders Saxham to the very eyelashes, and
lies in light drifts in every wrinkle of his garments, but with the
yellowish dust of the town.

"I rather thought," the Chaplain says, hesitating, as Saxham, without
lifting his eyes, turns his square, white face upon the visitor, "that you
said 'Come in'?"

"Come in, and shut the door, and sit down," says Saxham heavily and
thickly. And Julius does so, and, occupying the single cane-seated chair
the bedroom boasts, glows upon Saxham with a sincerity of affection and a
simplicity of admiration pleasant to see, and asks in his thin, sweet
voice how things are going.

"Things _are_ going," Saxham returns, seeming to wake from a heavy brown
study. "You could not put it better or more clearly. Will you smoke?" He
pitches a rubber tobacco-pouch to the Chaplain, who catches it, and the
treasured box of matches that comes after, and as one man sparingly fills
a well-browned meerschaum, and the other a blackened briar-root, with the
weed that grows more rare and precious with every hour of these days of
dearth: "That's one of the things that are going quickest after
perchloride of mercury, carbolic, and extract of beef. As a fact, we are
using formaldehyde as an anaesthetic in minor operations; and violet powder
and starch, upon the external use of which I laid an embargo weeks ago, to
the great indignation of the younger nurses, are being employed instead
of arrowroot. And the more the medical stores diminish, the more the
patients come rolling in."

"And each new want that arises, and each new difficulty that crops up,
finds in you the man to meet it and overcome it," says the Chaplain
fervently. He is disposed to make a hero of this brilliant surgeon who has
saved his life,