seem a lancer could pick them from their
nests of blue. The Southern Cross hung like a sign of hope to guide men
to a new Messiah.

In vain Jasmine had tried to sleep. The day had been too much for her.
All that happened in the past four years went rushing past, and she saw
herself in scenes which were so tormenting in their reality that once
she cried out as in a nightmare. As she did so, she was answered by a
choking cry of pain like her own, and, waking, she started up from her
couch with poignant apprehension; but presently she realized that it
was the cry of some wounded patient in the ward not far from the room
where she lay.

It roused her, however, from the half wakefulness which had been
excoriated by burning memories, and, hurriedly rising, she opened wide
the window and looked out into the night. The air was sharp, but it
soothed her hot face and brow, and the wild pulses in her wrists
presently beat less vehemently. She put a firm hand on herself, as she
was wont to do in these days, when there was no time for brooding on
her own troubles, and when, with the duties she had taken upon herself,
it would be criminal to indulge in self-pity.

Looking out of the window now into the quiet night, the watch-fires
dotting the plain had a fascination for her greater than the wonder of
the southern sky and its plaque of indigo sprinkled with silver dust
and diamonds. Those fires were the bulletins of the night, telling that
around each of them men were sleeping, or thinking of other scenes, or
wondering whether the fight to-morrow would be their last fight, and if
so, what then? They were to the army like the candle in the home of the
cottager. Those little groups of men sleeping around their fires were
like a family, where men grow to serve each other as brother serves
brother, knowing each other's foibles, but preserving each other's
honour for the family's pride, risking life to save each other.

As Jasmine gazed into the gloom, spattered with a delicate radiance
which did not pierce the shadows, but only made lively the darkness,
she was suddenly conscious of the dull regular thud of horses' hoofs
upon the veld. Troops of Mounted Infantry were evidently moving to take
up a new position at the bidding of the Master Player. The sound was
like the rub-a-dub of muffled hammers. The thought forced itself on her
mind that here were men secretly hastening to take part in the grim
lottery of life and death, from which