see?”

38

“How old were you?” Snake-hunting did not strike the Captain as a safe amusement for the young.

“I was eleven then—or ten, perhaps, and the little ones were two and three. Why? Then we came back to eat, and we sat under a rock all afternoon. It was hot, you see, and we played—we played with the stones and the flowers. You should see our Karroo in spring! All flowers! All our flowers! Then we came home, carrying the little ones on our backs asleep—came home through the dark—just like this night. That was our own day! Oh, the good days! We used to watch the meer-cats playing, too, and the little buck. When I was at Guy’s, learning to nurse how home-sick that made me!”

39“But what a splendid open-air life!” said the Captain.

39

“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 40back 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.”

40

“Very good,” said the Captain, obediently. It made the walk longer, and he approved of that.

“That’s a curious sort 

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