“Shot?” asked the doctor.

“Oh, dear, no!  That would have been to waste ammunition.  A limb was hacked off, and they bled to death.”

His mother was looking at the speaker with all her eyes, but she did not hear a word he said.  Was he pale or not?

Diana shuddered.

“And that is stopped—­forever?” Her eyes were on the speaker.

“As long as our flag flies there,” said the soldier, simply.

Her look kindled.  For a moment she was the shadow, the beautiful shadow, of her old Imperialist self—­the proud, disinterested lover of her country.

The doctor shook his head.

“Don’t forget the gin, and the gin-traders on the other side, Master Hugh.”

“They don’t show their noses in the new provinces,” said the young man, quietly; “we shall straighten that out too, in the long run—­you’ll see.”

But Diana had ceased to listen.  Mrs. Roughsedge, turning toward her, and with increasing foreboding, saw, as it were, the cloud of an inward agony, suddenly recalled, creep upon the fleeting brightness of her look, as the evening shade mounts upon and captures a sunlit hill-side.  The mother, in spite of her native optimism, had never cherished any real hope of her son’s success.  But neither had she expected, on the other side, a certainty so immediate and so unqualified.  She saw before her no settled or resigned grief.  The Tallyn tragedy had transformed what had been almost a recovered serenity, a restored and patient equilibrium, into something violent, tumultuous, unstable—­prophesying action.  But what—­poor child!—­could the action be?

* * * * *

“Poor Hugh!” said Mrs. Roughsedge to her husband on their return, as she stood beside him, in his study.  Her voice was low, for Hugh had only just gone up-stairs, and the little house was thinly built.

The doctor rubbed his nose thoughtfully, and then looked round him for a cigarette.

“Yes,” he said, slowly; “but he enjoyed his walk home.”

“Henry!”

Hugh had walked back to the village with Mrs. Colwood, who had an errand there, and it was true that he had talked much to her out of earshot of his parents, and had taken a warm farewell of her at the end.

“Why am I to be ’Henry’-ed?”—­inquired the doctor, beginning on his cigarette.

“Because you must know,” said his wife, in an energetic whisper, “that Hugh had almost certainly proposed to Miss Mallory before we arrived, and she had refused him!”

The doctor meditated.

“I still say that Hugh enjoyed his walk,” he repeated; “I trust he will have others of the same kind—­with the same person.”

“Henry, you are really incorrigible!” cried his wife.  “How can you make jokes—­on such a thing—­with that girl’s face before you!”

“Not at all,” said the doctor, protesting.  “I am not making jokes, Patricia.  But what you women never will understand is, that it was not a woman but a man that wrote—­