"And seventy-five out of a hundred of them stayed out of pure curiosity," came grimly from Saxham.
"To see what a siege would be like. Well, poor souls, they know now! You were going over to the Women's Laager. I'll walk with you, and say my say as I go. I'm on my way to Nordenfeldt Fort West. Something has gone wrong with the telephone-wire between there and Staff headquarters, and I can't get anything through but Volapuk or Esperanto. And those happen to be two of the languages I haven't studied." The dry, humorous smile curved the reddish-brown moustache again. The pleasant little whistle stirred the short-clipped hairs of it as the two men turned in the direction of the Women's Laager, over which the Red-cross flag was fluttering, and where the spider with the little Boer mare, picking at the scanty grass, waited outside the earthworks. Saxham's eyes did not travel so far. They were fastened upon a tall black figure and a less tall and more slender white figure that were by this time halfway upon their perilous journey across the patch of veld, bare and scorched by hellish fires, and ploughed by shrapnel ball into the furrows whence Death had reaped his harvest day by day.
"There goes one of the women we couldn't have done without," commented his companion, wheeling his bicycle beside Saxham, leading the brown Waler.
"It is the Mother-Superior," Saxham said, "with her ward, Miss Mildare."
"Ah! My invariable reply to Beauvayse—you know my junior A.D.C., who daily clamours for an introduction to Miss Mildare—is, that I have not yet had one myself, though at the outset of affairs I encountered the young lady under rather trying circumstances, in which she showed plenty of pluck. I thought I had told you. No? Well, it was one morning on the Recreation Ground. The School was out walking, a trio of nuns in charge, and some Dutch loafers mobbed them—threatened to lay hands on the Sisters—and Miss Mildare stood up in defence—head up, eyes blazing, a slim, tawny-haired young lioness ready to spring. And Beauvayse was with me, and ever since then has been dead-set upon making her acquaintance."
Saxham's blood warmed to the picture. But he said, and his tone was not pleasant: "Lord Beauvayse attained the height of his ambition a few minutes ago."
"Did he? Well, I hope disillusion was not the outcome of realisation. Up to the present"—the humorous, keen eyes were wrinkled at the corners—"all the boy's swans have been geese, some of 'em the sable kind."
Saxham answered stiffly: "I should say that in this case the swan decidedly predominates."
The other whistled a bar of his pleasant little tune before he spoke again. "It is a capital thing for Beauvayse, being shut up here, out of the way of women."
"Are there no women in Gueldersdorp?"