the things of the imagination, and saw each other face
to face. The nurse gave an exclamation of pleasure and ran forward.

Stafford held out a hand. It seemed to him, as he did it, that it
stretched across a great black gulf and found another hand in the
darkness beyond.

"Al'mah!" he said, in a voice of protest as of companionship.

Of all those he had left behind, this was the one being whom to meet
was not disturbing. He wished to encounter no one of that inner circle
of his tragic friendship; but he realized that Al'mah had had her
tragedy too, and that her suffering could not be less than his own. The
same dark factor had shadowed the lives of both. Adrian Fellowes had
injured them both through the same woman, had shaken, if not shattered,
the fabric of their lives. However much they two were blameworthy, they
had been sincere, they had been honourable in their dishonour, they had
been "falsely true." They were derelicts of life, with the comradeship
of despair as a link between them.

"Al'mah," he said again, gently. Then, with a bitter humour, he added,
"You here--I thought you were a prima donna!"

The flicker of a smile crossed her odd, fine, strong face. "This is
grand opera," she said. "It is the Nibelungen Ring of England."

"To end in the Twilight of the Gods?" he rejoined with a hopeless kind
of smile.

They turned to the outer door of the hospital and stepped into the
night. For a moment they stood looking at the great camp far away to
right and left, and to the lone mountains yonder, where the Boer
commandoes held the passes and trained their merciless armament upon
all approaches. Then he said at last: "Why have you come here? You had
your work in England."

"What is my work?" she asked.

"To heal the wounded," he answered.

"I am trying to do that," she replied.

"You are trying to heal bodies, but it is a bigger, greater thing to
heal the wounded mind."

"I am trying to do that too. It is harder than the other."

"Whose minds are you trying to heal?" he questioned, gently.

"'Physician heal thyself' was the old command, wasn't it? But that is
harder still."

"Must one always be a saint to do a saintly thing?" he asked.

"I am not clever," she replied, "and I can't make phrases. But must one
always be a sinner to do a wicked thing? Can't a saint do a wicked
thing, and a sinner do a good thing without being called the one or the
other?"

"I don't think you need apologize for not