clouded over with the shadow of an unreal
forgetfulness. Oh, it was bitter, very bitter! What would it be now to
go away, quite away from him, and know him married to her own sister,
the other woman with a prior right? What would it be to think of
Bessie's sweetness slowly creeping into her empty place and filling it,
of Bessie's gentle constant love covering up the recollection of their
wilder passion; pervading it and covering it up as the twilight slowly
pervades and covers up the day, till at last perhaps it was blotted out
and forgotten in the night of forgetfulness?

And yet it must be so: she was determined that it should be so. Ah, that
she had died then with his kiss upon her lips! Why had he not let her
die? And grieving thus the poor girl shook her damp hair over her face
and sobbed in the bitterness of her heart, as Eve might have sobbed when
Adam reproached her.

But, naked or dressed, sobbing will not mend matters in this sad world
of ours, a fact which Jess had the sense to recognise; so presently she
wiped her eyes with her hair, having nothing else at hand to wipe them
with, and set to work to struggle into her partially dried garments
again, a process calculated to irritate the most fortunate and
happy-minded woman in the whole wide world. Certainly in her present
frame of mind those damp, bullet-torn clothes drove Jess frantic,
so much so that had she been a man she would probably have sworn--a
consolation that her sex denied her. Fortunately she carried a
travelling comb in her pocket, with which she made shift to do her
curling hair, if hair can be said to be done when one has not a hairpin
or even a bit of string wherewith to fasten it.

Then, after a last and frightful encounter with her sodden boots, that
seemed to take almost as much out of her as her roll at the bottom of
the Vaal, Jess rose and walked back to the spot where she had left John
an hour before. When she reached him he was employed in saddling up
the two greys with the saddles and bridles that he had removed from the
carcases of the horses which the lightning had destroyed.

"Why, Jess, you look quite smart. Have you dried your clothes?" he said.
"I have after a fashion."

"Yes," she answered.

He looked at her. "Dearest, you have been crying. Come, things are black
enough, but it is useless to cry. At any rate, we have escaped with our
lives so far."

"John," said Jess sharply, "there must be no more of that. Things
have