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Maurice Gordon did not resume his work at once. He sat for some time idly drumming with his fingers on the desk. "If I can only get her to be civil to him," he reflected aloud, "I'll get into this business yet." At seven o'clock Durnovo appeared at the Gordons' house. He had managed to borrow a dress-suit, and wore an orchid in his buttonhole.
A little later Major Campbell reached Waggon Hill with four companies of the "Second Sixtieth," but their fire failed to dislodge the Boers, and the Gordons, under Miller-Wallnutt, were being sorely pressed, the Boers having a number of picked shots among the rocks on two sides whence they could bring a deadly fire to bear on the flanks of any force that might attempt to cross the open ground between.
The crash of musketry woke the sleeping town, and the streets resounded with the shouting of the officers and the rattling of arms as the men mustered in the darkness and hurried to the points of danger. Three companies of the Gordons had been left near Caesar's Camp, and these, under Captain Carnegie, threw themselves into the struggle.
His usual answer to the report that he has worn himself out or been carried away. Whilst he was firing I tried to get sight of a small mocking bird, which has learnt to imitate the warning whistle of the sentries. In the Gordons the Hindoo, Purriboo Singh, from Benares, stands on a huge heap of sacks under an umbrella all day and screams when he sees the big gun flash.
The convoy, which contained forage and provisions, had no guard of its own, but the drift was held by Colonel Ridley with one company of Gordons and one hundred and fifty mounted infantry without artillery, which certainly seems an inadequate force to secure the most vital and vulnerable spot in the line of communications of an army of forty thousand men.
He rode round on a hired horse to call on his friends, and on the afternoon of the sixth day he alighted from this quadruped at the gate of the Gordons' bungalow. He knew that Maurice Gordon had left that morning on one of his frequent visits to a neighbouring sub-factory. Nevertheless, he expressed surprise when the servant gave him the information.
Her first task was to see her father happily at work in his garden, and her next was to send her little maid to the Martin farm to help Auntie Jinit with her late spring soap-making. Not that Auntie Jinit needed help, but the Gordons strove in every way to show their friendliness towards their kind neighbor.
But when she grew up and became a great artist, and drew pictures as big as the Vicar of Wakefield's family group, and all the Gordons came to her drawing-room to wonder and admire, Sarah Emily and Aunt Margaret the most eager and admiring of all, then, though she would be very kind to them all, she would never smile.
How slow it seemed, but steadily, steadily on along the ridge they went. Now all the great orchestra of battle was playing from behind us on the right our artillery were firing at the hill in advance of the Manchesters and Gordons in one minute that I timed with my watch I counted sixteen discharges. How the shells shrieked and whirled over us!
It had come to be a family tradition among the Gordons that no luck would attend the bride who did not carry a white rose from Mary Gordon's rose-tree. Long years ago the tree had given up blooming, nor could all the pruning and care given it coax a single blossom from it.
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