"Is he dead ?" "Yes, my dear, yes; shot through the head, they say." Jess made no answer, but clung to the sapling, feeling as though she were going to die herself, and faintly hoping that she might do so.

Her eyes wandered vaguely from the face of the messenger of evil, first up to the sky, then down to the cropped and trodden veldt.

Past the gate of "The Palatial" garden ran a road, which, as it happened, was a short cut from the scene of the fight, and down this road came four Kafirs and half-castes, bearing something on a stretcher, behind which rode three or four carbineers.

A coat was thrown over the face of the form on the stretcher, but its legs were visible.

They were booted and spurred, and the feet fell apart in that peculiarly lax and helpless way of which there is no possibility of mistaking the meaning.
"_Look!_" she said, pointing.
"Ah, poor man, poor man!" said Mrs.Neville, "they are bringing him here to lay him out." Then Jess's beautiful eyes closed, and down she went with the bending tree.