by His indwelling spirit. The crisis in Scotland in the first issue gravely affects the Scots Kirk, and therefore calls forth the sympathy of every one of her sons, wherever he may be living; in the last issue it affects the freedom and the future of the Christian Church The Hibbert Journal.

throughout the English-speaking world. The Scots Kirk has often suffered in the past, and she is ready to suffer again; she has suffered in the cause of freedom, and now, whatever happens, the world may be sure Scotsmen will not sell the pass.

John Watson.

I doubt if I could give her real name. One so soon forgets the unimportant accessories; all the quicker for the inverse vividness of the main facts, the things that the memory will never let go. With men who knock about the world in strenuous living, objects are oftenest referred to by the phrase that best and most permanently hits them off. Girls are objects no less than men and things. In war-time they are seen and missed again, so quickly and casually that their names are mere arbitrary accidents, and they are remembered, if at all, by that which quickest and surest brings them up in the mind again. This, then, is the story of "the girl with the soft gray eyes."

It was Morgan, the man most concerned, who first used the phrase. And when it was all over; when the war at last ended, and we, who knew of the incident, had dispersed to the four clean winds of heaven from the tainted air of the veldt; then, if any man of us ever thought of her in his retrospect, it was by Morgan's phrase that he named her in his mind.

Morgan was an officer of M.I., recovering so slowly from a bad wound that he was not allowed out on trek, but sternly bidden to sit and rest himself as part of the garrison of a certain little town on the railway in the Transvaal-and I am not always cer

tain that I remember even the name of that.

The time was the time when many, but not nearly all, of the women and children from the back veldt had been brought into the concentration camps. The girl was-but you'll hear of her as you go on.

The town was held by a conglomeration of all sorts of odds and ends of derelict troops; stragglers, details, men from hospital, and dismounted men of operating columns; altogether a weary hotch-potch for an eager man to bark his shins and skin his heart upon. There was no more than one officer of any one unit, neither was there any regular mess. Barely any two of the officers joined rations and made pretence of chumming. In the insufferable dulness of life in a never-sniped garrison men had grown insufferable also to each other. Whisky had begun to go to the stomach, leaving the head merely the more morose. The place offered only two alternatives. A man could either flirt with a dozen "English" girls and women of the town, not necessarily the best looking, or he could exchange mordant banter with as many of the burgher girls as were surreptitiously eager to pick up information for the use of their friends outside. Of course there was always the eternal accident of love, and, as almost always in such circumstances, it was

oftenest the women who got hurt in that tragedy.

At last Morgan was seen to grow cheerful-so cheerful that the doctor became an unofficial member of that mess which had previously consisted only of Morgan and Hutchings, lieutenant of part of a Volunteer company that was soon to go home. Then came a day when the three were sitting in the mess hut, midday scoff just finished, pipes going and silence reigning. It was Morgan who broke the harmony of the moment by speech, causing the doctor to frown for a moment at such folly as talk.

"I'll take out the gun and try to get a hare or a kurhaan for dinner," said Morgan. "Too much bally biscuits and bully, you know”.

A moment's silence, which the doctor hoped might last, was exploded upon by Hutchings. "If you get us the game you are really going after, the girl with the gray eyes, that would be something to amuse us at least," spoke he, half savagely.

"The girl with the soft gray eyes," corrected Morgan once again with all that air of a man who "fancies himself in that particular quarter."

The doctor looked up. Morgan looked across at him.

"Hutchings has never forgiven me because it was I instead of himself who emptied three-parts of the mess stores into her Cape cart, when she drove in for provisions and found the shops had none."

"Yes," growled Hutchings to the doctor. "Fancy the beggar! He was field officer that day. If I'd been field officer she wouldn't have been allowed in at all-that's the way information goes out. But my lord Bairam here, the wild ass, he goes riding round on his long-tailed gee-gee, and he finds her stating her case to my sergeant on outpost there-you know these girls with the big gray eyes and how they

look at a man-so this wild ass must promptly bring up half the outpost and lug off all the mess stores that were any good and dump them into her cart. I suppose he looked at her then with a sort of an 'anything, anything else, queen of my heart?' sort of gaze, as if he'd done something wise."

"So I had, my dear little son," put in Morgan, with his most insufferable air. "Ladies first-that's always wisdom."

"You!-you penny noveletter, you!" retorted Hutchings to him in hugest disgust. Then, turning, "Well, doctor," he went on, "I suppose she looked at him with the 'You are so very kind' sort of flapdoodle in her eyes. At least, ever since that time there's hardly a day but my Lord John Ass here goes out-shooting!"

"While you still continue to fare sumptuously every day on-biscuits and bully," suggested the doctor in his most casual manner. And Hutchings growled.

"And the girl with the gray eyes," added the doctor presently. "She comes out to carry the bag home-I don't say to whose home?" ended he.

"No, that's it," returned Hutchings, with fresh disgust. "He goes right bang on into the house and drinks coffee with her people, just like a bally Boer on the opset. You can watch him go, any afternoon, through the big telescope Harrison's got up there on the koppie with the gun. You can follow the beggar all the way, and almost see the smirk on him."

"Not all the way," corrected Morgan suavely. "There's one dip there, a quarter of a mile wide or so, with a sluit in it. The veldt's not so flat as it looks from the koppie."

"No, but you are; you just dashed are as flat as you look when one watches you go through that telescope," delivered Hutchings crushingly.

"And why not?" returned Morgan imperturbably. "Loveliness will be served. Better a hardened sinner like myself should look flat than the young and tender Hutchings of the Gosling Greens."

At this allusion to the private shade of khaki he affected, Hutchings seized a beaker and looked threatening. The doctor intervened. "Then the girl lives at that farm on the Schoonfontein Road, I suppose. About three miles out, isn't it?"

"Yes," answered Hutchings. "It's the first you come to; the only one in that direction, in fact. Rich old beggar, her father. Fine big stone house, and lots of trees about-you know the sort of place."

The doctor nodded and pulled his moustache thoughtfully. "He's one of those who gave up their arms under Lord Roberts's proclamation about a year ago, isn't he?"

"He is," spoke Hutchings, disgustedly. The memory of the inevitable result of that proclamation inspired most officers with disgust.

"And he's never taken up arms again since, because he's too rich; he has too much to lose, living under the eye of a garrison as he is?" pursued the doctor evenly.

"That's just it," assented Hutchings. Morgan was merely leaning back, finishing his smoke, and beaming raggingly upon his comrade.

"But his son; her brother-well, we'll put it that he's not at home, except occasionally at midnight perhaps, for half an hour or so, and then with half-a-dozen Kaffirs on the look-out?" The doctor's air was very casual still as he talked.

"Exactly!" replied Hutchings. "But any column that goes out that way always hears from the young beggar and the gang he's got in the koppies beyond there. We ought to burn the farm and sweep off all there is-horses,

cattle, father, mother, girl, and every bally thing there. That would teach her brother what's war and what's picnic."

The doctor ignored that problem in ethics. He stuck pertinaciously to the line he seemed to be developing. “And those koppies where the brother has his range-they begin a mile or two beyond the house, don't they?"

"They do," spoke Hutchings, as aggrievedly as if the koppies were part of Morgan's cussedness.

"And you say," continued the doctor, still imperturbably, looking across at Morgan-"you say that there's one part of the way that the gun telescope can't look into. How far is that from the house?"

"Short of half a mile," answered Morgan offhand.

"Sluit in it, you said?" returned the doctor. "Comes down out of those koppies behind, doesn't it?" "Yes," returned Morgan, as though the point were not new to him.

"So, if there's any Boer there who fancies the girl himself?" put in the doctor with a significant pause.

Morgan knocked the ashes from his pipe with the air of one who knows. "Doctor, you're entirely on the wrong leg there. She's not the sort to be satisfied with any bally Boer. She's one of these girls of the Boer equivalent to the F.F.V.'s in America. Here their paters have plenty of money and send them down to the Cape for a swell education-dashed good schools they must be, too. Then they come home again to the veldt, and there's no correspondingly educated young man to match them, so they've got to look round for an Englishman-and they always do it."

"Well," returned the doctor agreeably. "We'll suppose the girls do look for an Englishman. Are we to suppose also that these young Boers, who haven't been sent down to the Cape for

an education, are any more effusively fond of the English for that?"

"Those Johnnies!" returned Morgan in amused contempt. "Doctor, those beggars don't count."

"All right then. It's your own show," finished the doctor with his slowest smile. "But, if you'll call at my tent as you go, my sergeant will give you a first-aid dressing."

"If you'd said he'd pour me a beaker of 'boy' out of those medical comforts of yours, I'd have said "Thanks, doctor,'" retorted Morgan, rising to his feet with a lazy shrug of his whole figure.

And in this manner Morgan took horse and gun and went to look forgame.

The veldt that seemed to sweep away so flat from the foot of the koppie dominating the town was really undulating; long slow folds sheeted with grass. Morgan gave no thought to the safety of such a ride. The big gun behind had such long range, and the Boers had left the place quiet for such a length of time, that the thought of that danger did not enter his mind, in spite of the doctor's warning on the point. But another warning of the doctor's, a parting warning, did enter his mind and keep place there.

The doctor had come out to run an eye, an Irishman's eye, over the horse that Morgan was to ride. Hutchings was not there, the groom was gone, and Morgan in the saddle had waited a moment for the doctor's opinion of the horse. An appreciative nod was all the doctor had to give to the horse. His words were back on the other subject still. "About this girl with the gray eyes," he had begun, with that casual way of his own-"suppose you make a mistake?"

"Oh, but I'm making no mistake," Morgan had returned contentedly. "I know when I'm the right man."

"That is just the thing I'm meaning,"

smiled the doctor easily. "Suppose you're so much the right man that you forget and make the mistake that better men than we have made before to-day. Suppose you do what will always haunt you afterwards?"

The smile had continued in the doctor's face as he looked the other quizzically in the eye. They were close friends, with that closeness which comes in war-time. And the smile had sharpened in Morgan's face as he returned the look. Yet he had paused a full breath before answering. she's not that sort of a girl at all," he had said.

"Oh,

"Neither is any other girl that sortif the man is not," the doctor returned. "One's never afraid of the girl; it's the man one's afraid of. But, by-by; good luck; I suppose your mother will be satisfied so long as the girl's not that sort of girl. One daughter-in-law will be as good as another, eh, thinks she?"

"I'm hanged if she does," Morgan had returned frankly, almost laughing as he thought of his mother's certain and vigorous horror at the bare notion of a Boer daughter-in-law. So he had ridden away.

But it had not come to anything like daughters-in-law yet. It was only that this thing was as pleasant to the one as the other in this dreary monotony of the war, thought he as he rode. He quite failed to grasp-as so many of us failed-that this which was monotony to him was a slow-drawn horror of tragedy to the girl; a long, long, horror of agony; as it must have been to every one of burgher blood; this crawling extinction of their national freedom. With such a tragedy-how many of us have ever paused to realize its true awfulness?-wearing out the deeps of her heart every waking hour, this which was so pleasant a pastime to him, because it relieved a mere monotony, might well be proportion

ately sweeter to her as a relief to what was so much a real heartbreak.

So Morgan kept his way, conning only his own side of the question, guessing no profounder depths for her. His smile was the smile of a man quite certain of the girl he was going to see. Yet it was not wholly complacent. He was no more of a bounder than his neighbor, and as little a saint. He was just the ordinary average man riding to meet a very nice girl. Only he was of the conquering race, she of the conquered. It was in that one circumstance lay all the particular possibilities of the case. But he never thought of it that way. He was going to visit the girl with the soft gray eyes, and it was nobody's business but hers and his, thought he to himself as he passed the sluit and topped the last rise that brought him within close range of the house he was heading for.

The house was a well-masoned burgher farmhouse of the best classand how good a class that is!-flanked by well-tree'd orchard and garden, by shade and shelter trees of gum and wattle, and by well-fenced "lands" complete. Very fair do such farmsteads show, set in the wide sweep of veldt and koppie; poignantly desolate did they show when war had blasted them with fire and axe. At that moment, this one, in its untouched aspect, showed the fairer to Morgan because of his errand.

Yet the girl with the gray eyes-when he had been invited to dismount and enter by the father-seemed in no way exceptional for beauty as she stepped from a side room into the dim fore-chamber, or main room, to greet him, even as her mother greeted him. She had that suggestion of strong comeliness of limb and body which is common in the upper-class burgher families. She had the good bust which the teapot and feeding-bottle promise to eliminate elsewhere. She

had that gentle, half wondering, sweet gravity which is vanishing before the march of progress and intellect in more refined countries. Her hair, apart from the wealth of it, the common dower of her class, was only a dark brown, unless she happened to come into the light. Then, indeed, it shone with sudden threads and wefts of gold that gave its piled-up clouds a quick glory which infallibly caught the eye of any man beholding it. And the soft gray eyes; those eyes that had named her? Well, they are not quite absent in our own land; those eyes which seem so true and tender wherever we find them.

Although the Dowager Mrs. Morgan, so to speak, might well demand of her son that he should point out any particular justification for the possible enormity of bringing a Boer girl into the family, Morgan Pater, if he existed, might have just looked at the girl's face and decided that Morgan Secundus was in luck-he would never need inquire into the preliminary procedure of the Divorce Court.

Morgan took coffee courteously, as a visitor should. It was the mother who called for it and the Kaffir girl who brought it. But it was the girl with the gray eyes who softly looked the question of whether it was quite to his taste, and it was to her he looked his answer that it was all right. It ought to have been: it was out of his own mess stores.

But presently it was the mother who was looking at the girl, and then the girl was looking at him, with an eye that invited him to step outside with her, to the stoep or verandah which runs in front of all decent burgher houses. And the whole proceeding was so new that Morgan rose with a little feeling of wonder.

Outside, however, the girl did not halt on the verandah, but led the way on down the steps to the shade of the