--I'd swear to it--that she'd fairly taken his breath away."

"My dear Lord!" The Mayor took a great deal of comfort out of a title.
"Attractive the young lady is, I certainly admit, and my wife is--I may
say the word--in her praise. But you go one, or half a dozen, better than
Mrs. Greening, who will be perfectly willing, I don't doubt, to introduce
you, unless the Colonel entertains objections ..."

"To Staff flirtations? Regard 'em as inevitable, Mr. Mayor, like Indian
prickly-heat, or fever here. And probably the best cure for the complaint
in the present instance would be to meet the cause of it."

"Judge for yourself, Colonel; you've first-class long-distance eyesight."
There was a ring of defiance in the boy's fresh voice. "You've seen her
before, and it isn't the kind of face one forgets. Here they are ... here
she is now, coming back, with the other ladies. The railing spoils one's
view, but the gates are open, and in another moment you'll see her pass
them."

The Chief moved to the front of the stoep where the Staff had congregated.
Men quietly fell aside, making place for him, so that he stood with
Beauvayse, in a clear half-circle of figures attired like his own, in
Service browns and drabs and umbers, waiting until the three approaching
feminine shapes should pass across the open space. One or two Staff
monocles went up. The Chief Medical Officer removed and wiped his
steel-rimmed eyeglasses before replacing them on his bony aquiline nose.

They came and passed--the white figure and the two black ones. Of these
one was very tall, one short and dumpy--veiled and mantled, their hands
hidden in their ample sleeves, they went by with their eyes upon the
ground. But the girl with them--a slight, willowy creature in a creamy
cambric dress, a wide hat of black transparent material, frilled and
bowed, upon her dead-leaf coloured hair, and tied by wide strings of
muslin under her delicate round chin--looked with innocent, candid
interest at the group of men outside the Hospital. The tanned faces, the
simple workman-like Service dress, setting off the well-knit, alert
figures, the quiet, soldierly bearing, even the distant sound of the
well-bred voices, pleased her, even as the whiff of cigars and Russian
leather that the breeze brought down from the stoep struck some latent
chord of subconscious memory, and brought a puzzled little frown between
the delicately-drawn dark eyebrows arching over black-lashed golden