and his enthusiasm is only marred by Saxham's
painfully-apparent lack of belief in certain vital spiritual truths that
are the daily bread of fervent Christian souls. Now that he has become
aware of the black band upon the sleeve of the jacket that lies across
Saxham's knees, where he sits upon the end of the cot-bed that, with a
tiny chest of drawers and a hanging bookshelf laden with volumes and
instrument-cases, completes the furnishing of the narrow room, he says,
with sympathy in his gentle voice and in the brown eyes that have the soft
lustre of a deer's or of a beautiful woman's:

"I am sorry to see this, Saxham. You have lost a friend?"

"_Lost a friend?_"

Saxham, echoing the last three words, stares at the Chaplain in a strange,
dull way, and then forgets him for a minute or more. Baths are not to be
had in Gueldersdorp in these days, and though it is not Sunday, when
bathing in the river becomes a possibility, the Chaplain observes that the
Doctor's thick, close-cropped black hair is wet, and that broad streaks of
shining moisture are upon his pale, square face, and that he breathes as
though he had been running. But perhaps he has been sluicing his head in
the washstand basin, thinks the Chaplain. No; the basin has not recently
been used. And then it occurs to Julius, but not until he has noticed the
starting veins and corded muscles on the backs of the hands that are
clenched upon the jacket, that Saxham is suffering.

"I always said he felt a great deal more than he permitted himself to
show," reflects the man of Religion looking at the man of Medicine. "And
the absence of belief in Divine Redemption and a Future State must
terribly intensify the pain of a bereavement. If I only knew how to
comfort him!" And all he can do is to ask, still in that tone of sympathy,
when the Funeral is to be.

"Perhaps about the midday coffee-drinking," says Saxham heavily, "they
would scrape a hole and dump him in. But they're not over fond of risks,
and they would probably leave him where he is till nightfall."

Julius Fraithorn longs, more than ever, that eloquence and inspiration
were his to employ in the healing of the man who has raised himself almost
from the dead. But he can only falter something about the inscrutable
designs of Providence, and not a sparrow falling to the ground unnoticed.
And he expresses, somewhat tritely, the hope that Saxham's friend was
prepared to meet his end.

"I don't exactly suppos