ut him, and his eyes
looked a little less sunken.

Then he handed over the cigarettes.

"Shouldn't mind one myself," he said genially.

Frank gave him one before lighting his own.

"You're a good sort," said the Major, "and I wish I could give you one
of my old cigars I used to give my friends."

"Ah! well, when your ship comes home," observed Frank, throwing away his
match.

The Major nodded his head as with an air of fallen grandeur.

"Well," he said, "_vorwaerts_. That means 'forward,' my dear," he
explained to Gertie.

Gertie said nothing. They took up their bundles and went on.

(V)

It was not till a week later that Gertie did that which was to effect so
much in Frank--she confided in him.

The week had consisted of the kind of thing that might be
expected--small negligible adventures; work now and then--the Major and
Frank working side by side--a digging job on one day, the carrying of
rather dingy smoke-stained hay on another, the scraping of garden-paths
that ran round the small pink house of a retired tradesman, who observed
them magnificently though a plate-glass window all the while, with a
cigar in his teeth, and ultimately gave them ninepence between them.
They slept here and there--once, on a rainy night, in real lodgings,
once below a haystack. Frank said hardly a word to Gertie, and did
little more than listen to the Major, who was already beginning to
repeat himself; but he was aware that the girl was watching him.

The crisis came about under circumstances that might be expected--on a
rather sentimental kind of Sunday evening, in a village whose name I
forget (perhaps it was Escrick) between Selby and York. Frank had made a
small excursion by himself in the morning and had managed to hear mass;
they had dined well off cold bacon and beans, and had walked on in the
afternoon some miles further; and they came to the village a little
after six o'clock. The Major had a blister, which he had exhibited at
least four times to the company, and had refused to go further; and as
they came to the outskirts of the village, volunteered to go and look
for shelter, if the two would wait for him at a stile that led across
fields to the old church.

The scene was rather like the setting of the last act in a melodrama of
a theater on the Surrey side of the Thames--the act in which the injured
heroine, with her child, sinks down fainting as the folk are going to
church in the old village on a June eve