“Where else is there to live except the open air?” said Sister Margaret, looking off into twenty thousand square miles of it with eyes that burned.
“You’re quite right.”
“I’m sorry to interrupt you two,” said Sister Dorothy, who had been talking to the gunner Major; “but the guard says we shall be ready to go in a few minutes. Major Devine and Dr. Johnson have gone down already.”
“Very good, Sister. We’ll follow.” The Captain rose unwillingly and made for the worn path from the camp to the rail.
“Isn’t there another way?” said Sister Margaret. Her grey nursing gown glimmered like some big moth’s wing.
“No. I’ll bring a lantern. It’s quite safe.”
“I did not think of that,” she said with a laugh; “only we never come home by the way we left it when we live in the Karroo. If any one—suppose you had dismissed a Kaffir, or got him sjamboked,[[2]] and he saw you go out? He would wait for you to come back on a tired horse, and then.... You see? But, of course, in England where the road is all walled, it is different. How funny! Even when we were little we learned never to come home the way we went out.”
“Very good,” said the Captain, obediently. It made the walk longer, and he approved of that.
“That’s a curious sort of woman,” said the Captain to the Major, as they smoked a lonely pipe together when the train had gone.
“You seemed to think so.”