Milne would give them a chance, poor chaps."

"You mean--?"

"They would fight hard to the bitter end--would sell their lives dearly.
I am afraid you must face the worst. I wish I could say otherwise, but
I can't. Eh, Hoste?"

The latter nodded. He had very willingly allowed the other to do all
the talking. Then, as all things come to an end sooner or later--even
Wigmore Street--so eventually did this trying interview.

"I say, George. That just was a bad quarter of an hour," said Hoste, as
the two companions-in-arms found themselves once more in their favourite
element--the open air, to wit. "I don't want to go through it again
many times in a lifetime. If ever there was `broken heart,' writ large
in any woman's face, it is on that of poor Mrs Carhayes. I believe
she'll never get over it."

Payne, who had shown himself far from unfeeling during the
above-mentioned trying interview, regarded this remark as a direct
challenge to the ingrained cynicism of his nature.

"You don't, eh?" he replied. "Well, I don't want to seem brutal, Hoste,
but I predict she'll be patching up that same `broken heart' in most
effective style at some other fellow's expense, before the regulation
two years are over. They all do it. Lend us your 'bacco pouch."

Hoste said nothing. But for that little corner of the curtain of her
suspicions which his wife had lifted on the first night of Eanswyth's
arrival, he might have been three parts inclined to agree with his
friend. As things stood, he wasn't.

But could they at that moment have seen the subject of their
conversation, it is possible that even the shelly and cynical Payne
might have felt shaken in his so glibly expressed opinion. In the
seclusion of her room she sat, soft tears coming to the relief of the
hitherto dry and burning eyes as she pressed to her lips, forehead, and
heart, a little bit of cold and tarnished metal. It was the broken spur
which Eustace had been wearing at the time of the disaster, and which
her recent visitors had just given her. And over this last sorry relic
she was pouring out her whole soul--sorrowing as one who had no hope.

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN.

THE SHIELD OF HER LOVE.

When Eustace Milne fell from his saddle to the earth, the savage who had
stabbed him, and who was about to follow up the blow, started back with
a loud shout of astonishment and dismay.

It arrested the others. They paused as they stood. It arrested assegai