an brown face of the Chief,
as the sweet young clarion rang out:

"Gentlemen--the Queen!"

The brimming glasses rose high,--one crystal wave with the crimson of
blood in it. The resonant English and the thinner Colonial voices answered
together with a crash. As of the wave breaking on white cliffs northwards,
and a great surge of love and loyalty went out from all those hearts to
England, throbbing to the steps of the Throne where She sat, bowed with
great griefs and great joys and great triumphs and glories, and
white-haired with the full burden of her venerable years.

"The Queen!"

XXI

They lingered not long over wine and cigars. Lady Hannah Wrynche,
entertaining what she disdainfully termed a "hen party" in her private
rooms at Nixey's, vacated in her honour by the landlord's wife--expected
them to coffee. Much to the relief of the military authorities at Cape
Town, Milady, most erratic of Society meteors, had quitted that centre of
painstaking official misinformation, for the throbbing spot of debatable
land whence events might be gathered as they sprang. Shooting across the
orbit of the reddening, low-hanging War-planet, she had descended upon
Gueldersdorp in a shower of baggage-trunks, fox-terriers, and
interrogations. For one thing, she explained to everybody, she had
undertaken to supply a London Daily with a series of articles, written
from the Seat of Hostilities, and for another, Bingo was on the Staff, and
it would be so nice for him, poor dear, to have his wife near him in case
he happened to get ... was "chipped" the proper technical term, or
"potted"? The articles were intended to be the real thing--racy of the
soil, don't you know? and full of "go" and atmosphere. Let it be said here
that they achieved raciness. The London print in which they appeared came
to be christened by the scoffer and the incredulous the _Daily Whale_--it
swallowed and disgorged so many of the Jonahs rejected by other editors.
But the profits increased, and the proprietors could afford to smile at
envy.

Just now the insatiable gold fountain-pen from whence our indefatigable
Lady Correspondent derived her literary pseudonym, was employed in
recording merest gossip, in the absence of the longed-for opportunity for
its wielder to prove herself the equal, if not the superior, of Dora Corr.
Dora was the woman Lady Hannah admired and envied above all others.
Colonial Editor to _The Thunderbolt_, War Correspondent, fina