erously conscious that these
nightmares were less harassing than one nasty, perplexing little vision
that kept cropping up among the others. It had no beginning and no end. In
it the Matron's room at the Convalescent Hospital and Kink's Family Hotel
at Tweipans were somehow mixed up, and the ingenuous Mr. Van Busch, that
Afrikander gentleman of British sympathies, whose chivalrous and patriotic
sentiments had prompted and urged him to the imperilling of his own skin
and the risking of his own liberty in the interests of an English lady
masquerading for political reasons as the refugee-widow of a German
drummer, was oddly confused in identity with an uncomfortably mysterious
individual who possessed neither features nor name.

"Ask her if she remembers the Free State Hotel on the veld, three days'
trek from Dreipoort, and Bough, who was her friend?" the voice would say..

"You are Bough?" she would find herself asking.

There would be a little guttural, horrible laugh, and nothing would answer
but the buzzing of the wire.

And then she was wide awake and sitting up in bed, with a thumping heart.
She was no longer in any doubt as to the identity of the owner of the
voice. Van Busch was in Gueldersdorp ... and however he came, and whatever
disguise of person or of purpose sheltered him, his presence boded no
good. The merely logical masculine mind doffs hat respectfully before the
superiority of feminine intuition.

XLVIII

Saxham, shouldering out of Julius's hotel upon his way to Staff Bombproof
South, is made aware that the hundred-foot-high dust-storm that has raged
and swirled throughout the morning is in process of being beaten down into
a porridge of red mud by a downpour of February rain.

Straight as Matabele spears it comes down, sending pedestrians who have
grown indifferent to shell-fire to huddle under cover, adding to the
wretchedness of life in trench or bombproof as nothing else can. And the
Doctor, biting hard upon the worn stem of the old briar-root, as he goes
swinging along through the hissing deluge with his chin upon his breast
and his fierce eyes sullenly fixed upon the goal ahead, recalls, even more
vividly than upon Sunday, the angry buffalo of Lady Hannah's apt analogy.

He is drenched to the skin, it goes without saying, in a minute or two. So
is the Railway Volunteer, who challenges him at the bridge that carries
the single-gauge railway southward over the Olopo, in spite of his ra