If only the thirst did not torture him, if only the sounds of the battle were less loud in his ears!  It was so long since he waked from that long sleep, and the world was so full of noises, the air so arid, and the light of the sun so fierce.  Darkness would be peace.  He longed for darkness.

He thought of the spring that came from the rocks in the glen behind the house, where he was born in Derbyshire.  He saw himself stooping down, kneeling to drink, his face, his eyes buried in the water, as he gulped down the good stream.  Then all at once it was no longer the spring from the rock in which he laved his face and freshened his parched throat; a cool cheek touched his own, lips of tender freshness swept his brow, silken hair with a faint perfume of flowers brushed his temples, his head rested on a breast softer than any pillow he had ever known.

“Jasmine!” he whispered, with parched lips and closed eyes.  “Jasmine—­water,” he pleaded, and sank away again intothat dream from which he had but just wakened.

It had not been all a vision.  Water was here at his tongue, his head was pillowed on a woman’s breast, lips touched his forehead.

But it was not Jasmine’s breast; it was not Jasmine’s hand which held the nozzle of the water-bag to his parched lips.

Through the zone of fire a woman and a young surgeon had made their way from the attending ambulance that hovered on the edge of battle to this corner of death in the great battle-field.  It mattered not to the enemy, who still remained in the segment of the circle where they first fought, whether it was man or woman who crossed this zone of fire.  No heed could be given now to Red Cross work, to ambulance, nurse, or surgeon.  There would come a time for that, but not yet.  Here were two races in a life-and-death grip; and there could be no give and take for the wounded or the dead until the issue of the day was closed.

The woman who had come through the zone of fire was Al’mah.  She had no right to be where she was.  As a nurse her place was not the battle-field; but she had had a premonition of Stafford’s tragedy, and in the night had concealed herself in the blankets of an ambulance and had been carried across the veld to that outer circle of battle where wait those who gather up the wreckage, who provide the salvage of war.  When she was discovered there was no other course but to allow her to remain; and so it was that as the battle moved on she made her way to where the wounded and dead lay.

A sorely wounded officer, able with the help of a slightly injured gunner to get out of the furnace of fire, had brought word of Stafford’s death but with the instinct of those to whom there come whisperings, visions of things, Al’mah felt she must go and find the man with whose fate, in a way, her own had been linked; who, like herself, had been a derelict upon the sea of life; the grip of whose hand, the look of whose eyes the last time she saw him, told her that as a brother loves so he loved her.