Where was Dulcie, then, and what was she doing? How supporting herself, as she said she would have to do? Had she found friends, or, months ago, been trodden, with all her tender beauty, down in the mire of misfortune and adversity? These were maddening thoughts for one so far away and so utterly powerless to help her as Florian felt himself, and rendered him at times more reckless of his own existence because it was useless to her. The air around was heavy with the dewy fragrance of strange and tropical plants, and vast, spiky, and fan-shaped leaves cast their shadows over him as he strove to snatch the proverbial 'forty winks' before again going 'the rounds,' or posting the hourly reliefs, for they are always hourly when before an enemy. And when our weary young soldier did sleep, he dreamt, not of the quick-coming strife, nor even of blue-eyed Dulcie, with her wealth of red golden hair, but, as the tender smile on his lips might have showed, of the time when his mother watched him in his little cot, with idolizing gaze, and when he, the now bronzed and moustached soldier, was a little child, with rings of soft dusky hair curling over his white forehead; when his cheeks had a rosy flush, and his tiny mouth a smile, and she fondly kissed the little hands that lay outside the snow-white coverlet her own deft fingers had made--the two wee hands that held his mother's heart between them--the heart that had long since mouldered by Revelstoke Church. And so he slept and dreamed till roused by the inevitable cry of 'Sentry, go!' and, that duty over, as he composed himself to sleep again, with his knapsack under his head for a pillow, he thought as a soldier-- 'To-day is ours. To-morrow never yet On any human being rose or set!' CHAPTER XIX. ELANDSBERGEN. Next morning when the picquet was relieved young Sheldrake, who paid Hammersley's company in absence of the latter, who was soon expected with a strong draft from England, said to Florian-- 'Look here, MacIan, I've made a stupid mistake. The company's money I have left among my heavier baggage in the fort beyond Elandsbergen, and I have got the Colonel's permission to send you back for it. This is just like me--I've a head, and so has a pin! The Quartermaster will lend you his horse, and you can have my spare revolver and ammunition. Have a cigar before you go,' he added, proffering his case, 'and look sharp after yourself and the money. There is a deuced unchancy lot in the quarter you are going back to. We don't advance from this till to-morrow, so you have plenty of time to be with us ere we cross the river, if you start at once.'