ot like Jigger
to be absent when Stafford needed him.

She looked out from under the gun, as though expecting to find him
coming--to see him somewhere on this stricken plain. As she did so she
saw the young surgeon, who had stayed to help the wounded gunner,
stumbling and lurching towards the gun, hands clasping his side, and
head thrust forward in an attitude of tense expectation, as though
there was a goal which must be reached.

An instant later she was outside hastening towards him. A bullet spat
at her feet, another cut the skirt of her dress, but all she saw was
the shambling figure of the man who, but a few minutes before, was so
flexible and alert with life, eager to relieve the wounds of those who
had fallen. Now he also was in dire need.

She had almost reached him when, with a stiff jerk sideways and an
angular assertion of the figure, he came to the ground like a log,
ungainly and rigid.

"They got me! I'm hit--twice," he said, with grey lips; with eyes that
stared at her and through her to something beyond; but he spoke in an
abrupt, professional, commonplace tone. "Shrapnel and mauler," he
added, his hands protecting the place where the shrapnel had found him.
His staring blue eyes took on a dull cloud, and his whole figure seemed
to sink and shrink away. As though realizing and resisting, if not
resenting this dissolution of his forces, his voice rang out
querulously, and his head made dogmatic emphasis.

"They oughtn't to have done it," the petulant voice insisted. "I wasn't
fighting." Suddenly the voice trailed away, and all emphasis, accent,
and articulation passed from the sentient figure. Yet his lips moved
once again. "Ninety-nine Adelphi Terrace--first floor," he said
mechanically, and said no more.

As mechanically as he had spoken, Al'mah repeated the last words.
"Ninety-nine Adelphi Terrace, first floor," she said slowly.

They were chambers next to those where Adrian Fellowes had lived and
died. She shuddered.

"So he was not married," she said reflectively, as she left the
lifeless body and went back to the gun where Stafford lay.

Her arm through which the bullet had passed was painful, but she took
no heed of it. Why should she? Hundreds, maybe thousands, were being
killed off there in the hills. She saw nothing except the debris of Ian
Stafford's life drifting out to the shoreless sea.

He lived still, but remained unconscious, and she did not relax her
vigil. As she watched an