Stafford held out a hand.  It seemed to him, as he did it, that it stretched across a great black gulf and found another hand in the darkness beyond.

“Al’mah!” he said, in a voice of protest as of companionship.

Of all those he had left behind, this was the one being whom to meet was not disturbing.  He wished to encounter no one of that inner circle of his tragic friendship; but he realized that Al’mah had had her tragedy too, and that her suffering could not be less than his own.  The same dark factor had shadowed the lives of both.  Adrian Fellowes had injured them both through the same woman, had shaken, if not shattered, the fabric of their lives.  However much they two were blameworthy, they had been sincere, they had been honourable in their dishonour, they had been “falsely true.”  They were derelicts of life, with the comradeship of despair as a link between them.

“Al’mah,” he said again, gently.  Then, with a bitter humour, he added, “You here—­I thought you were a prima donna!”

The flicker of a smile crossed her odd, fine, strong face.  “This is grand opera,” she said.  “It is the Nibelungen Ring of England.”

“To end in the Twilight of the Gods?” he rejoined with a hopeless kind of smile.

They turned to the outer door of the hospital and stepped into the night.  For a moment they stood looking at the great camp far away to right and left, and to the lone mountains yonder, where the Boer commandoes held the passes and trained their merciless armament upon all approaches.  Then he said at last:  “Why have you come here?  You had your work in England.”

“What is my work?” she asked.

“To heal the wounded,” he answered.

“I am trying to do that,” she replied.

“You are trying to heal bodies, but it is a bigger, greater thing to heal the wounded mind.”

“I am trying to do that too.  It is harder than the other.”

“Whose minds are you trying to heal?” he questioned, gently.

“‘Physician heal thyself’ was the old command, wasn’t it?  But that is harder still.”

“Must one always be a saint to do a saintly thing?” he asked.

“I am not clever,” she replied, “and I can’t make phrases.  But must one always be a sinner to do a wicked thing?  Can’t a saint do a wicked thing, and a sinner do a good thing without being called the one or the other?”

“I don’t think you need apologize for not being able to make phrases.  I suppose you’d say there is neither absolute saintliness nor absolute wickedness, but that life is helplessly composite of both, and that black really may be white.  You know the old phrase, ’Killing no murder.’”

She seemed to stiffen, and her lips set tightly for a minute; then, as though by a great effort, she laughed bitterly.

“Murder isn’t always killing,” she replied.  “Don’t you remember the protest in Macbeth, ’Time was, when the brains were out the man would die’?” Then, with a little quick gesture towards the camp, she added, “When you think of to-day, doesn’t it seem that the brains are out, and yet that the man still lives?  I’m not a soldier, and this awful slaughter may be the most wonderful tactics, but it’s all beyond my little mind.”