"If I know Captain Frazer,
he'll have nothing to-day that will please him more."

With feasting and story-telling and the inevitable letters to wife
and sweetheart, the sunshiny day lost itself in twilight and the
twilight in the chill of night. Along the line of the blockhouses
for miles away, lights began to twinkle out from the narrow
loopholes. Throughout the camp, answering lights twinkled back at
them till the night was spotted thick with dots of yellow, winking
up at the yellow stars above. And around the camp and the
blockhouses lay the dark, measureless veldt, and the veldt was very
still.

Stillness was not in the camp, however. Even the gluttonous
Queenslanders had recovered from their woes of the morning; and,
from end to end of the great enclosure, there was a spirit of
merrymaking born of the feast day, the dinner and the unwonted
allowance of rum. In the groups scattered about the camp fires,
tongues wagged freely of home, of boyhood, of adventures in past
years. War talk was tabooed that night. According to his custom,
Tommy ignored the present and ranged at large over the remote past
and yet remoter future.

Carew, with the easy adaptability which marked him, was the central
figure of one of the groups where he acted as a species of
toastmaster, to direct the trend of the stories and lead the
singing. Weldon sat slightly apart, watching the firelit group
before him, while his mind trailed lazily to and fro, from home,
with its holly wreaths in the windows, to Cape Town where the
flower-boxes edging a wide veranda would be a mass of geranium
blossoms now, and where, in the shady western end, would sit a tall
girl with hair the color of the yellow flame. Strangely enough, to
his honest, straightforward mind it never occurred to doubt that she
was thinking of him, sending a Christmas wish in his direction. More
than once she had given proof of her liking for him, her interest in
his concerns. Her blue eyes had met his eyes steadily, kindly.
Weldon had certain old-fashioned notions of womanhood which not all
of his social life had been able to beat out of him. Far back in his
boyhood, his mother, still a social leader at home, had told him it
was unmanly to flirt. A good and loyal woman would have no share in
flirtation; women of the other sort could have no share in his life.
Weldon was no Galahad. He had danced and dined with many women, had
given sympathy to some, chaff to others; nevertheless, his