thickened and swollen and reddened by
intemperance. The figure, perfect in its manliness, if marred by the too
heavy muscular development of the throat and the slightly bowed shoulders,
looked well in the jacket of Service khaki, the Bedford cords and puttees
and spurred brown boots that had replaced the worn white drills, the blue
shirt and shabby black kamarband and canvas shoes. Looking at Saxham, even
with knowledge of his past, you could not have associated a personality so
striking and distinguished, an individuality so original and so strong,
with the idea of the tipsy wastrel, wallowing like a hog in self-chosen
degradation.

The Mother-Superior, coming up the ladder leading out of her underground
abode as the horseman and the attendant spider drew near, thought of
Bartolomeo Colleoni, as you see him, last of the great Condottieri, in the
bronze by great Verrochio at Venice to-day. In armour, complete in the
embossed morion, one with the great Flemish war-horse, he sat to the
sculptor, the baton of Captain-General, given him by the Doge of Venice,
in the powerful hand that only a little while before aided his picked men
of the infantry to pack and harden snow about the granite boulders of the
mountains in the Val Seriana, and sent the giant snow-balls thundering
down, crushing bloody lanes through the ranks of the Venetian cavalry
massed in the narrow defile below, and striking chill terror to the hearts
of Doge and Prince and Senate.

Only the baton was a well-worn staghorn-handled crop, Squire Saxham's
gift, together with a hunter, to his boy Owen, at seventeen. It was one of
the few relics of home that had stayed by Saxham during his wanderings.

He reined up now, saluting the Mother-Superior with marked respect.

"Good-morning, ma'am. All well with you and yours?"

She answered with unusual hesitation:

"All the Sisters are well, thank you. But--if you could spare me a minute,
Dr. Saxham, there is a question I should like to ask."

"As many minutes as you wish, ma'am. It is not your day for the Hospital,
I think?"

"Ah, no!" she said, with the velvety South of Ireland vowel-inflection.
"We keep Wednesday for the Women's Laager, always. Many of them are so
miserable, poor souls, about their husbands and sons and brothers who are
in the trenches, or who have been killed, and then there are the children
to be cared for and washed. Not only the siege orphans, but so many who
have sick or neglectful mothe