"Reverend Mother," sounded from below.
"They are calling us," she said, as though awakened from a dream.
"May I take you down?"
He offered his arm with deference, and she touching it lightly, they went
down together. Lynette came to them laughing, a cup in either hand, her
aides-de-camp following with plates that held the siege apology for bread
and butter and familiar-looking cubes of something....
"Thank you, Miss Mildare. What have you here, Beau? Cake, upon my word! Or
is it a delusion born of long and painful abstinence from any form of
pastry?"
"Cake it is, sir, and thundering good cake," proclaimed Beauvayse. "Made
from Sister Tobias's special siege recipe, without candied peel or plums
or carraways, or any of the other what-do-you-call-'ems that go into the
ordinary article. Go in and win, sir. I've had three whacks. Haven't I,
Miss Mildare?"
He spoke with the infectious enjoyment of a schoolboy, and Lynette's
laugh, sweet and gay as a thrush's sudden trill of melody, answered:
"I think you have had four."
She flushed as she met the Colonel's eyes, reading in them masculine
appreciation of her delicate, vivid beauty, and put her freed hand into
the lean palm he held out, saying, with a shy, sweet smile that lifted one
corner of the sensitive mouth higher than the other:
"I didn't come to say How do you do? before, because I saw you were busy
talking to Mother." Her quick glance read something amiss in another face.
"Mother, how tired you look! Please bring that little camp-stool, Mr.
Fraithorn. Oh, thank you, Dr. Saxham; that one with arms is more
comfortable. Colonel, we're all under your command. Won't you please order
the Mother to sit down and rest? She will be so tired to-morrow. Dearest,
you know you will."
She took the Mother's hand, confidently, caressingly. The end of the thin
black veil, that was shabby now, and had darns in many places, was wafted
across her face by a vagrant puff of cooled air from the river, and she
kissed it, bringing the tears very near the deep, sad eyes that looked at
her, and then turned away. Saxham, in default of any excuse for lingering
near her, went back to Lady Hannah, who had been diligently mining in him
with the pick and shovel of Our Special Correspondent, and getting nothing
out, and sat himself doggedly upon a stone beside her.
"That is a sweet girl." She nibbled bannock, sparsely margarined, and
sipped her sugarless, milkless tea, sitting on a little bushy knoll,
warranted free from puff-adders and tarantulas. Saxham answered stiffly:
"Many people here seem to be under--the same impression."
"Don't you share it? Don't you think her sweet?"
"I have seen young ladies who were--less deserving of the adjective."
Lady Hannah jangled a triumphant laugh. She wore the tailored garb the
average Englishwoman looks best in, at home and abroad, an alpaca coat
and skirt of cool grey; what the American belle terms a "shirt-waist" with
pearl studs, and a big grey hat with a voluminous blue silk veil. Her
small face was smaller than ever, but her eyes were as round and as bright
as a mouse's or a bird's, and her talk was full of glitter and vivacity.
"'Praise from Dr. Saxham.' ... If I were a man," she declared, "I should
_perdre la boule_ over that girl. I don't wonder where she gets her lovely
manners from, with such a model of grace and good breeding as Biddy Bawne
before her eyes, but I do ask how she came by that type of beauty? And
Biddy----"
"Biddy?" repeated Saxham, at a loss.
Her laugh shrilled out.
"I forgot. She is the Reverend Mother-Superior of the Convent to all of
you. But I was at school with her, and I can't forget she used to be
Biddy. She was one of the great girls, and I was a sprat of ten, but she
condescended to let me adore her, and I did, like everybody else. To be
adored is her _metier_. The Sisters swear by her, and that girl worships
the ground under her feet. If I had a daughter I should like her to look
at me in that way--heart in her eyes, don't you know, and what eyes!
Topaz-coloured, aren't they? She has no conversation, of course. _I_
hadn't at her age--nineteen or twenty, if I am any guesser. What she will
be at thirty, if she don't go off! That little Greek head, and all those
waves of rusty-coloured hair. Quite wonderful! And her hands and feet and
skin--marvellous! And that small-boned slenderness of build that is so
perfectly enchanting. Paquin would delight to dress her. And"--her
jangling laugh rang out, waking echoes from hollow places--"it looks--do
you know?--it looks as though he would get the chance."
"Why does it?" demanded Saxham, turning his square face full upon Lady
Hannah, and lowering his heavy brows.
"Mercy upon us, Doctor, do you want me to be definite and literal? Can't
you do as I do, and use your eyes?" Her own round, sparkling black ones
were full of provocation. "They look as if they could see rather farther
into a mud wall than most people's. Please get me one of those peaches.
No, I won't have a plate. I am beginning to find out that most of the
things Society regards as indispensable can be done without. I'm beginning
to revert to Primitive Simplicity. Isn't there a prehistoric _flair_ about
most of us? If there isn't, there ought to be. For what are we from
week-end to week-end but grimy male and female Troglodytes, eating minced
horse and fried locusts in underground burrows by the light of paraffin
lamps! Another peach.... Thanks. Can't you see those dear things, the
Sisters, gathering them by lantern-light, and being shelled by Brounckers'
German gunners. Wretches! Beasts! Horrors!"
"I hope," said Saxham, with rather heavy irony, "that you acquainted them
with your opinion of them while you had the opportunity?"
She gaily flipped him with the loose tan gloves she had drawn off. Her
bangles clashed, and her eyes snapped sparks under the brim of her hat,
whose feathers nodded and swished, and her jangling laugh brought more
echoes from the high banks.
"Ha, ha, ha! Do you know, Doctor, I call that thoroughly nasty--to remind
me, on such a fine day too, of the Frightful Fiasco. When my own husband
hasn't ventured to breathe a hint even.... Do you know, when he rode out
to meet me with the Escort, all he said was, 'Hullo, old lady; is that
you? The Chief wants to know if you'll peck with us at six, and I told him
I thought you'd be agreeable.' And when we met, _he_---- Why do
handkerchiefs invariably hide when people want to sneeze behind them?" She
found the ridiculous little square of filmy embroidered cambric, and blew
her thin little nose, and furtively whisked away a tear-drop. "He never
moved a muscle; Just shook hands in his kind, hearty way, and began to
tell the news of the town.... Never, by look or word or sign, helped to
rub in what a beetle-headed idiot I'd been." She gulped. "I could have put
my head down on the tablecloth and cried gallons"--she blew her nose
again--"knowing 'd lost him a rook at least. For, of course, that flabby
Slabberts creature counted for something in the game, or Brounckers
wouldn't have wanted him. And Captain--my Captain!..." She threw a
sparkling eye-dart tipped with remorseful brine at the spare, soldierly
figure and the lean, purposeful face. "If you were to say to me this
minute, 'Hannah Wrynche, jump off the end of that high rock-bluff there,
down on those uncommonly nasty-looking stones below,' I vow I'd do it!"
Saxham's blue eyes were kind. Here was a fellow hero-worshipper.
"I believe you would do it, and--that he believes it too."
She tapped him on the sleeve with the long cherry-wood stick of her white
green-lined umbrella.
"Thank you. But don't get to making a habit of saying charming things,
because the role of Bruin suits you. Your Society women-patients used to
enjoy being bullied, tremendously, I remember. We're made like that." Her
shrill laugh came again. "To _sauter a pieds joints_ on people who are
used to being deferred to, or made much of, is the best way to command
their cordial gratitude and sincere esteem, isn't it? Don't all you
successful professional men know that?"
"The days of my professional successes are past and gone," said Saxham,
"and my very name must be strange in the ears of the men and women who
were my patients. It is natural and reasonable that when a man falls out
of the race, he should be forgotten--at least, I hold it so."
"You have a patient not very far away who lauds you to the skies." Lady
Hannah indicated the slender pepper-and-salt clad figure of Julius
Fraithorn with the cherry-wood umbrella-stick. "You know his father, the
Bishop of H----? Such a dear little trotty old man, with the kind of rosy,
withered-apple face that suggests a dear little trotty old woman,
disguised in an episcopal apron and gaiters, and with funny little bits of
white fur glued on here and there for whiskers and eyebrows. We met him
with Mrs. Fraithorn at the Hotel Schwert at Appenbad one June. Do you know
Appenbad? Views divine: such miles of eye-flight over the Lake of
Constance and the Rhine Valley. To quote Bingo, who suffered hideously
from the whey-cure, every prospect pleases, and only man is bile--and
woman, too, if seeing black spots in showers like smuts in a London fog,
only sailing up instead of coming down, means a disturbed gastric system.
I'm not sure now that the Bishop did not mention your name. Can he have
done so, or am I hashing things? Do set my mind at rest?"
Saxham said with stiffness:
"It would be possible that the Bishop would remember me. I operated on him
for the removal of the appendix in 18--"
"If you had taken away his Ritualistic prejudices at the same time, you
would have made his wife a happy woman. Her soul yearns for incense and
vestments, candles, and acolytes, and most of all for her boy. Well, she
will thank you herself for him one day, Doctor." The little dry hand,
glittering with magnificent rings, touched Saxham's gently. "In the
meantime let a woman who hasn't got a son shake hands with you for her."
"You make too much of that affair." Saxham took the offered hand. It
pressed his kindly, and the little lady went on:
"You're still a prophet in your own country, you know, though it pleases
you to make yourself out a--a kind of medical Rip Van Winkle. In June last
year--when I did not guess that I should ever know you--I heard a woman
say: 'If Owen had been here, the child wouldn't have died.' And the woman
was your sister-in-law, Mrs. David Saxham."
Saxham's blue eyes shot her a steely look. The wings of his mobile
nostrils quivered as he drew quickened breath. He waited, with his
obstinate under-lip thrust out, for the rest. If he did not fully grasp
the real and genuine kindliness that prompted the little woman, at least
he did her the justice of not shutting her up as an impudent chatterbox.
She went on, a little nervously:
"I don't think I ever mentioned to you before that I had met your brother
and his wife? She is still a very attractive person, but--it is not the
type to wear well, and the boy's death cut them both up terribly."
"There was a boy--who died?"
"In the spring of last year. Of--meningitis, I think his mother said, and
she declared over and over that if you had been there, you would have
saved him."
"At least, I should have done my best."
She had turned her eyes away in telling him, or she would have seen the
relief in his face. He understood now why his mother's trustees had
prompted the solicitors' advertisement. He was his nephew's heir, under
the late Mrs. Saxham's will. Seven thousand in Consols and Home Rails, and
the little freehold property in North Wales, that brought in, when the
house was let, about one hundred and fifty pounds a year, counted as
wealth to a man who had possessed nothing. He lifted his square head and
threw back his heavy shoulders with the air of one from whom a heavy
burden has been taken. His vivid eyes lightened, his heavy brows smoothed
out their puckers, and the tense lines about his lips relaxed. His own
words came back to him:
"The Past is done with. Why should not the Future be fair?"
He knew, as he looked towards Lynette Mildare, who personified the Future
for him, and his mood changed. He had loved her without hope. Now a faint
grey began to show in the blackness of his mental horizon. It might be a
false dawn, but what a lightening of the heavy heart--what a leap of the
stagnant blood--answered to it! He was no longer penniless. He had never
loved money or thirsted for estate, but the thought of that sum of seven
thousand pounds solidly invested, and the house that stood in its walled
garden on the cliffs at Herion, looking out on the wild, tumbling
grey-white waters of Nantavon Bay, was dear to him.
Plas Bendigaid had been a Convent once. Its grey, stone-tiled,
steep-pitched roof and solid walls of massive stone had sheltered his
mother's infancy and girlhood. Perhaps they might cover a lovelier head,
and echo to the voices of his wife and his children. He gave sweet fancies
the rein, as Lady Hannah chattered beside him. He dreamed of that Future
that might be fair, even as he filled up the little lady's pauses with
"Yes's" and "No's."
Love at first sight. He had laughed the possibility to scorn, in other
days, holding the passion to be the sober child of propinquity, sympathy,
consonance of ideas, similar tastes, and pursuits, and fanned into flame,
after due time to kindle, by the appearance of a rival.
A rival! He laughed silently, grimly, remembering the resentful, jealous
impulse that had prompted his interruption when the boyish, handsome face
of Beauvayse had leaned so near to hers, and the blush that dyed her
white-rose cheeks had answered, no doubt, to some hackneyed, stereotyped,
garrison compliment.
He had seen them together since then: once crossing the veld from the
Women's Laager on foot, in the company of the Mother-Superior; once here
beside the river, under the chaperonage of all the Sisters; once in the
Market Square, and always the sight had roused in him the same intolerable
resentment and gnawing pain that rankled in him now as he watched them.
What was Beauvayse whispering, so close to the delicate little ear that
nestled under the red-brown hair-waves? Something that set his grey-green
eyes gleaming dangerously, and lifted the wings of the fine nostrils, and
opened the boldly-curved mouth in audacious laughter, under the short
golden hairs of the clipped moustache. Somehow that laughter stung Saxham.
His muscular hand gripped the old hunting-crop that he carried by habit
even when he did not ride, and his black brows were thunderous as he
vainly tried to listen to the little woman who chattered beside him.
"Look about you," she bade him, putting up her tortoiseshell-rimmed
eyeglasses as though she were in a picture-gallery or at a theatre.
"Wouldn't the ordinary unimaginative person suppose that Love would be the
last flower to blossom in the soil of this battered little bit of
debatable ground? But we know better. So does Miss Wiercke, the German
oculist's daughter, and so does that tallow-candle-locked young man who
plays the harmonium at the Catholic Church. And that other pretty girl--I
don't know her name--who used to keep the book-registers at the Public
Library. She is going to marry that young mining-engineer--a Cornishman,
judging by his blue eyes and black hair--do you happen to be Cornish,
too?--next Sunday. And the uncertainty about living till then or any time
after Monday morning will make quite a commonplace wedding into something
tremendously romantic. But you don't even pretend to look when you're
told. Aha!" she cried; "I've caught you. You were watching another pair of
lovers--the couple I kept for the last."
"Not at all," said Saxham, inexpressibly wearied by the voluble little
woman's discourse. Ignoring the conventional disclaimer, Lady Hannah went
on:
"They're in the early stage--the First Act of the dear old play. Pretty to
watch, isn't it? Though it makes one feel chilly and grown old, as
Browning or somebody says. Only the other day one was tipping that boy at
Eton, and he looking such a Fourth of June darling as you never saw, got
up in duck trousers and a braided blue jacket, and a straw hat with a
wreath of white and crimson Banksia roses round it for the Procession of
Boats. And now"--she sighed drolly--"he's a long-legged Lieutenant of
Hussars, with a lady-killing reputation. Though, in the present instance,
I'm ready to back my opinion that the biter is fairly bit. What regiments
of women will tear their hair--real or the other thing--when Beau becomes
a Benedick."
Saxham saw red, but he gave no sign. She turned down her little thumb with
a twinkle of triumph.
"_Habet!_ And I'm not sorry he has got it badly. His _leitmotif_ in the
music-play has been 'See the Conquering Hero' up to now; one isn't sorry
to see one's sex avenged. But one _is_ sorry for Mary Fraithorn's boy."
She indicated the Chaplain with a twirl of her eyeglasses. "She used to
visit him with the Sisters when he was ill, and, of course, he has been
bowled over. But _il n'a pas un radis_, unless the Bishop comes round, and
don't you think that little Greek head of hers is aware that a great deal
of money goes with the Foltlebarre title, and that the family diamonds
would suit it to a marvel?"
Saxham said gratingly, and with a hostile look:
"Do you infer that Miss Mildare is vain and mercenary?"
"Good mercy, my dear man!" she screamed; "don't pounce. I infer nothing,
except that Miss Mildare happens to be a live girl, with eyes and the gift
of charm, and that the young men are attracted to her as naturally as
drones to a honey-pot. Also, that, if she's wise, she will dispose of her
honey to the best advantage." Her beady bright eyes snapped suddenly at
Saxham, and her small face broke up into laughter. "Ha, ha, ha! Why, I do
believe ..." She screamed at him triumphantly. "You, too! You've
succumbed. She carries your scalp at her pretty waist with the rest of
'em. How perfectly delightful!"
Possibly Saxham had always been a bear, as her little ladyship had stated,
but the last five years had certainly scraped off whatever social veneer
had adhered to his manners. The power of facial self-control, the common
tact that would have carried things off with a laugh and a jest, were his
no longer, if he had ever possessed them. He got upon his feet and stood
before the woman whose six ounces less of brain-matter had been
counterbalanced by so large an allowance of intuition, dumbly furious with
her, and so unspeakably savage with himself for not being able to hide his
anger and annoyance that, as he stood before her with his hulking
shoulders hunched and his square, black head sullenly lowered, and his
eyes blazing under their heavy brows, he suggested to Lady Hannah's nimble
wit and travelled experience the undeniable analogy between a chaffed and
irate Doctor and a baited Spanish bull, goaded by the stab of the gaudy
paper-flagged dart in his thick neck, and bewildered by the subsequent
explosion of the cracker. He only wanted a tail to lash, she mentally
said, and had pigeon-holed the joke for Bingo when it became none.
"Do, please, forgive me!... What you must think of me!..." she began
contritely.
Repentance gave place to resentment. Saxham, without even an abrupt
inclination of the head, had swung about and left her. She saw the
heavily-shouldered, muscularly-built figure crossing the drift a little
way down, stepping from boulder to boulder with those curiously small,
neat feet, twirling his old horn-handled hunting-crop as he went, with a
decidedly vicious swish of the doubled thong. Now he was knee-deep in the
reeds of the north shore; now he was climbing the bank. A black-and-white
crow flew up heavily, and was lost among the intertwining branches of the
oaks and the blue-gums, and a cloud of finches and linnets rose as the
covert of tree-fern and cactus and tall grass, knitted with thorny-stemmed
creeper, received him and swallowed him. She saw by the shaking of the
foliage that he turned up the stream, and then no more of him.
Feather-headed idiot that she had been! Inconsiderate wretch! How, in
Heaven's name, after reminding the man of the perfidy of that underbred
_passee_ little person with the passion for French novels and sulphonal
tabloids, who had thrown the Doctor over, years before, in favour of his
brother the Dragoon--how could she have charged him with being a victim to
the charms of another young woman? If Mrs. David's desertion rankled
still, as no doubt it did, there being no accounting for masculine taste,
he would, of course, resent the accusation almost as an insult. Men were
such Conservatives in love. And, besides, she had just been telling him
about the child. She loathed herself for having perpetrated such a
blunder. Saxham had murdered politeness by quitting her abruptly; but
hadn't she deserved the snub? She deserved snubbing. She would go, for the
health of her soul, and talk to dearest Biddy, who always made you feel
even smaller than you had thought yourself before.
She stood up, shaking the sand-grams and grass-burrs from her dress and
the folds of the white umbrella. It was nearing six o'clock. The heat was
lessening, and the pale turquoise sky overhead was flecked and dappled
with little puffs of rosy cloud, bulking in size and deepening in colour
to the westward, where their upper edges were pure gold. And the river
looked like a stream of liquid honey, upon which giant rose-leaves had
been scattered, and a breeze was stirring in the grasses and among the
leaves. The Sisters were busily repacking their baskets. Little Miss
Wiercke, and her lank-haired young organist, sat under a bush, gazing in
each other's eyes with the happy fatuity of lovers in the second stage,
while the young lady who had kept the registers at the Public Library was
teaching her Cornish mining-engineer to wash up cups and saucers in a tin
basin--a process which resulted in the entanglement of fingers of
different sexes, and made Sister Tobias pause over her task of wiping
crockery to shake her head and laugh.
Little Miss Wiercke was to lose her lank-haired organist a few days later,
the prevalent complaint of shrapnelitis carrying him off. And the girl who
screamed coquettishly as the mining-engineer amorously squeezed her wet
fingers under the soapsuds was shortly to be represented in the
Cornishman's memory by another white cross in the Cemetery, a trunk full
of pathetic feminine fripperies, and a wedding-ring that had been worn
barely two months. But they did not know this, and they were happy. We
should never love or laugh if we knew.
Two other people had passed along the path that ran by the margin of the
sand and reed-patches, and were lost to sight. Lady Hannah glanced towards
the Mother-Superior, who was being gracious to Captain Bingo and the
Chaplain, and hoped Biddy would not miss the owner of the little Greek
head and the enchanting willowy figure quite yet.
Nuns were frightfully scrupulous and gimlet-eyed where their charges were
concerned. And certainly, if young people never got away together without
_qu'il ne vous en deplaise!_ there would be fewer engagements. And Biddy
must know that it was a Heaven-sent chance for the girl.
The Foltlebarres had sat too long on thorns to grumble at Beau's marrying
a girl without a _dot_, who was not only lovely enough to set Society
screaming over her, but modest and a lady. Up to the present his tendency
had been to exalt Beauty above Breed, and personal attractiveness above
moral immaculateness.
As in the most recent case of that taking but extremely terrible little
person with the toothy, photographic smile, Miss Lessie Lavigne of the
Jollity Theatre, the affair with whom might be counted, it was to be
hoped, as the last furrow of a heavy sowing of wild oats. As this would be
a match _d'egal a egal_--in point of blood and education, at any
rate--certainly the Foltlebarres would have reason to bless their stars.
Somebody came over to her just then, saying:
"Bingo seems in excellent spirits."
She looked, a little apprehensively, across to where the Mother Superior
and the wistful-eyed, pepper-and-salt-clad Chaplain were patiently
listening to the recital of one of Bingo's stock anecdotes.
"What is he telling the Reverend Mother?" Her tone was anxious. "I do hope
not that story about the unwashed Boer and the cake of soap!"
"Don't be alarmed. It's a recent and completely harmless anecdote about
the despatch-runner from Diamond Town who got in this morning."
Her eyes sparkled.
"Really ...? And with news worth having?"
"Mr. Casey might be disposed to think so."
"Who is Mr. Casey?"
"That's a question nobody can answer satisfactorily."
"But is the intelligence absolutely useless to anybody who doesn't happen
to be Mr. Casey?" she insisted.
"Not unless they happened to be deeply interested in Mrs. Casey."
"There is a Mrs. Casey, then?"
"So says the man who travelled two hundred miles to bring her letters and
the message that she is, as Mr. Micawber would put it, _in statu quo_."
"I understand." The bright black eyes were compassionate. "She has written
to her husband--she doesn't know that he has been killed----"
"Nor do we. As far as we can ascertain, the garrison has never included a
Casey."
"Then you think----"
"I think"--he glanced aside as a stentorian bellow of laughter reached
them--"that, judging by what I hear, Bingo has got to the soapy story."
She frowned anxiously.
"Bingo ought to remember that nuns aren't ordinary women. I shall have to
go and gag him." She took a dubious step.
"Why? The Reverend Mother does not seem at all shocked, and Fraithorn is
evidently amused." He added, as Bingo's rapturous enjoyment of his own
anecdote reached the stamping and eye-mopping stage: "And undoubtedly
Bingo is happy."
"He has got out of hand lately. One can't keep a husband in a proper state
of subjection who may be brought home to one a corpse at any hour of the
day." Her laugh jangled harshly, and broke in the middle. "The soil of
Gueldersdorp being so uncommonly favourable just now to the production of
weeds of the widow's description."
"It grows other things." His eyes were very kind. "Brave, helpful,
unselfish women, for instance."
"There is one!"
She indicated the tall, black-robed figure of the Mother with a quick
gesture of her little jewelled hand.
"And here is another." He touched her sleeve lightly with a finger-tip.
"Brave.... Helpful." Her voice was choky. "Do you think I shall ever
forget the hindrance I have been to you? Didn't I lose you your Boer spy?"
"Granted you did." His moustache curved cheerfully at the corners. "But
that's Ancient History, and look what you brought back!"
"A unit of the despised majority who is thoroughly convinced of her own
superfluousness. Hannah Wrynche, with the conceit so completely taken out
of her that she feels, say, like a deflated balloon; Hannah Wrynche, who
believed herself born to be a War Correspondent, and has come down to
scribbling gossipy paragraphs for a little siege newspaper printed in a
damp cellar."
He laughed.
"Collectors will pay fancy prices for copies of that same little siege
newspaper, at auctions yet to be."
"I've thought of that," she confessed. "But, oh! I could make it so much
more spicy if you'd only give me a freer hand."
His hazel eyes had a smile in them. "I know you think me an editorial
martinet."
"You blue-pencil out of my poor paragraphs everything that's interesting."
"No personalities shall be published in a paper I control."
"The Reading Public adore personalities and puerilities."
"They can go to the _Daily Whale_ for them, then."
"Isn't that rather a personal remark?"
"Let me say that if you are occasionally personal, you are never, under
any circumstances, anything but clever."
"Thank you. But, oh! the difference between what I am and what I aspired
to be!"
"And, ah! the difference between what I have done and what I meant to do!"
he said.
Her black eyes flashed. "You have never really felt it. Achievement with
you has never hit below the mark. You, of all men living, are least fitted
to enter into the rueful regrets and dismal disillusions of a Hannah
Wrynche."
"Hannah Wrynche, who is content to do a woman's work and fill a woman's
place; Hannah Wrynche, who has atoned for a moment of ambitious--shall I
say imprudence?--splendidly and nobly, has no reason to be rueful or
regretful. Don't shake your head. Do you think I don't know what you are
doing, day after day, to help and cheer those poor fellows at the
Convalescent Hospital?"
Her eyes were full of tears. "You make too much of my poor efforts. You
underestimate the effect of praise from you."
"I said very little in the last cipher despatch that got through to
Colonel Rickson at Malamye, but what I did say was very much to the
purpose, believe me."
She gasped, staring at him with circular eyes of incredulity. "You've
mentioned--me--in your despatches. ME?"
"Just so!" he said, and left her groping for the ridiculous little
gossamer handkerchief to dry the tears of pride and gratitude that were
tumbling down her cheeks.