ur feeling, after you had,
as you believed, killed me, you never would have stood and let that
Sepoy shoot you; so that all the pain that you have been going
through, and may still have to go through before you are quite
cured, is a punishment that you have yourself accepted. After a man
has once been punished for a crime there is an end of it, and you
need grieve no further over it; but it will be a lesson that I hope
and believe you will never forget.

"Hackett, who has been my soldier servant for the last five years,
was killed in the fight in the Kaiser Bagh. If you like, when you
rejoin, I shall apply for you in his stead. It will make your work
a good deal easier for you, and I should like to have the son of
one of my old tenants about me."

The man burst into tears.

"There, don't let's say anything more about it," Mallett went on,
taking the thin hand of the soldier in his. "We will consider it
settled, and I shall look out for you in a couple of months, so get
well as quick as you can, and don't worry yourself by thinking of
the past. I must be off now, for I have to take down a party of
convalescents to rejoin this evening.

"Goodbye, lad," and without waiting for any reply, he turned and
left the marquee.

Chapter 5.

"It is little more than two years and a half since I left,
Lechmere, but it seems almost a lifetime."

"It does seem a time, Major. We must have marched thousands of
miles, and I could not say how many times we have been engaged.
There has not been a week that we have not had a fight, and
sometimes two or three of them."

"Well, thank God, we are back again. Still I am glad to have been
through it."

"So am I, sir. It will be something to look back on, and it is
curious to think that while we have been seeing and doing so much,
father and my brother Bob have just been going about over the farm,
and seeing to the cattle, and looking after the animals day in and
day out, without ever going away save to market two or three times
a month at Chippenham."

"And you have quite made up your mind to stay with me, Lechmere?"

"Quite, sir. Short of your turning me out, there is nothing that
would get me away from you. No one could be happier than I have
been, ever since I rejoined after that wound. It has not been like
master and servant, sir. You have just treated me as if you had
been the squire and I had been your tenant's son, and that nothing
had ever come between us. You have mad