eager when he heard your name.'

"'Oh, he _does_ know me then?' said Jack, his interest reviving. 'I
didn't understand.'

"'Oh yes. I mentioned your name when I heard it, and he said at once if
it was _Jack_ Berkeley he would extremely like to see him. It was stupid
of me not to ask his name.'

"'I'll be ready to go with you in a moment,' said Jack, after frantic
efforts discovering in a bucket a very small reserve of water with which
he managed to wash his face clear of some part of its grimy covering.
'My servant's gone to Balaclava to see what he could get in the way of
food for a change from these dreadful salt rations. He brought me a
bottle of porter the other day; it cost three shillings, but I never
enjoyed anything so much in my life.'

"'I can quite believe it,' said Captain Montagu feelingly. 'Your servant
must be worth his weight in gold.'

"In another minute they were on their way. The sun was beginning to sink,
fortunately; it was not _quite_ so hot as a few hours previously. But it
was quite as dusty, and the walking along a recently and roughly made
track, not worthy the name of road, was very tiring. It was fully five
miles to Kadikoi--five miles across a bare, dried-up country, from which
all traces of the scanty cultivation it had ever received were fast
disappearing under the present state of things. There was not a tree,
hardly a stunted shrub, to be seen, and the ground--at best but a few
inches of poor soil above the sterile rock, felt hard and unyielding
as well as rough. It was a relief of its kind at last to quit the level
ground for the slope leading down to Balaclava, where, though they were
too small to afford anything in the shape of shade, the sight of some
few, starved-looking bushes and some remains of what might once have been
grass, refreshed the eye, at once wearied and dazzled by the glare and
monotony of the sun-dried plain.

"The tent to which Captain Montagu led the way stood by itself on some
rising ground, a little behind the row of nondescript hovels or mud huts
representing what had been the little hamlet of Kadikoi. It looked
wretched enough as the two young men made their way in, but everywhere
looked wretched, only the bareness and comfortlessness impressed one
doubly when viewed in connection with physical suffering that would have
been hard to endure even with all the alleviations and tenderness of
friends and home about one.

"The doctor was just leaving the tent