live them down.
At first Tynie wanted to die, but he soon said he would see it
through--blind at forty. You have had your trials, you have them still;
but every gift of man is yours, and every opportunity. Will you not
live it all out to the end? Allah knows the exit He wants for us, and
He must resent our breaking a way out of the prison of our own making.

"You've no idea how this life of work with Jasmine has brought things
home to me--and to Jasmine too. When I see the multitude of broken and
maimed victims of war, well, I feel like Jeremiah; but I feel sad too
that these poor fellows and those they love must suffer in order to
teach us our lesson--us and England. Dear old friend, great man, I am
going to quote a verse Tynie read to me last night--oh, how strange
that seems! Yet it was so in a sense, he did read to me. Tynie made me
say the words from the book, but he read into them all that they were,
he that never drew a literary breath. It was a poem Jasmine quoted to
him a fortnight ago--Browning's 'Grammarian,' and he stopped me at
these words:

"'Thither our path lies; wind we up the heights:
Wait ye the warning?
Our low life was the level's and the night's;
He's for the morning.'

"Tynie stopped me there, and said, 'That's Stafford. He's the Alpine
fellow!' ..."

A few sentences more and then the letter ended on a note of courage,
solicitude and friendship. And at the very last she said:

"It isn't always easy to find the key to things, but you will find it,
not because you are so clever, but because at heart you are so good....
We both send our love, and don't forget that England hasn't had a tenth
of her share of Ian Stafford...."

Then there followed a postscript which ran:

"I always used to say, 'When my ship comes home,' I'd have this or
that. Well, here is the ship--mine and Jasmine's, and it has come Home
for me, and for Jasmine, too, I hope."

Stafford looked out over the veld. He saw the light of the sun, the joy
of summer, the flowers, the buoyant hills, where all the guns were
silent now; he saw a blesbok in the distance leaping to join its
fellows of a herd which had strayed across the fields of war; he felt
that stir of vibrant life in the air which only the new lands know; and
he raised his head with the light of resolve growing in his eyes.

"Don't forget that England hasn't had a tenth of her share of Ian
Stafford," Alice Tynemouth had said.

Looking round, h