The German drummer's refugee-widow, who lived behind two green-shuttered, blinded windows at Kink's Hotel, and was a sister of that good Boer Mijnheer Hendryk Van Busch—"a sister indeed!" snorted Mevrouw Kink; and never went to the kerk-praying, or put her nose out of doors at all before dark, and had a maid who did her hair, and wore her own in waves, the impudent wench! and whose portmanteau, and bag, and boots, and shoes, and skirt-bands, had fashionable London tradesmen's labels inside them, was the only person in the village of Tweipans and for a mile round it—good Nederlands measure—who did not know that she was an English prisoner-of-war.
Her foray in quest of Secret Information had had its hardships, as its alarms and excursions, but she plumed herself on having accomplished something of what she had set out to do. Van Busch, not counting a week of days when she had found reason to suspect his entire good faith, had behaved like a staunch Johannesburger of British blood and Imperial sympathies. But his valuable services had been rendered for so much more than nothing that Lady Hannah found herself in the condition her Bingo was wont to describe as "stony." She had sent for Van Busch to tell him that the position was untenable. She would evacuate it, when he could manage to get hold of Nixey's mouse-coloured trotter and the spider, left in the care of Van Busch's good friend Bough, at Haargrond Plaats.
A dash for freedom then. In imagination she could hear the mouse-coloured trotter's hoofs rattling over the stony ground, and the crack, crack of the sentries' Mausers, followed by a hail of bullets from the trenches.... She could see the headlines of the latest newspaper sensation, flaming on the greenish gloom of the room with the closed shutters and drawn-down blinds:
"Stirring Story from the Seat of Hostilities: Lady War-Correspondent runs the Gauntlet of Boer Rifles."
"Speshul. Hextry Speshul!"
* * * * *
Perhaps she would be mortally wounded by the time she got through the lines, so as to hang in bleeding festoons over the splashboard, and sink into the arms of the husband loved better than aught save Glory, gasping, as her heroic spirit fled——
* * * * *
"Did the gracious lady say she would have her boots on?"
Trudi got up from the flattest and most uncomfortable of the two forbidding beds Kink's principal guest-chamber boasted, and ran her unoccupied needles through her interminable knitting, a thick white cotton sofa-cover or counterpane of irritating pattern—and stood over against her employer in an attitude of sulky submission. She was a square-shouldered, sturdily-built young woman of twenty-five, with round eyes of pinky-blue garnished with white eyelashes, no eyebrows, and a superb and aggressively-brilliantined head of fair hair elaborately dressed, waved, and curled.