ipotent high-priest and
priestess--papa and mamma. Almost as inviolable, that is, when those
who live in it are our friends. Of course, the people in the newspapers
go dying--are even killed in railway accidents. This frame of mind
will change for Sally when she has seen this patient die. For the
time being, she is half insensible--can think of other things.

"What did the party mean that let me in, mother darling? The fusty
party? She said she thought it was the Major. I didn't take any notice
till now. I wanted to get up."

"It was the other Major, dear--Major Roper. Don't you know? _He_ used
to talk of him, and say he was an old gossip." In the dropped voice and
the stress on the pronoun one can hear how the speaker's mind knows
that the old Colonel is almost part of the past. "But they were very
old friends. They were together through the Mutiny. _He_ was his
commanding officer." Sally's eyes rest on the old sabre that hangs
on its hook in the wall, where she has often seen it, ranking it
prosaically with the other furnishings of "the Major's" apartment. Now,
a new light is on it, and it becomes a reality in a lurid past, long,
long before there was any Sally. A past of muzzle-loading guns and
Minie rifles, of forced marches through a furnace-heat to distant forts
that hardly owned the name, all too late to save the remnant of their
defenders; a past of a hundred massacres and a thousand heroisms;
a past that clings still, Sally dear, about the memory of us oldsters
that had to know it, as we would fain that no things that are, or are
to be, should ever cling about yours. But you have read the story often,
and the tale of it grows and lives round the old sabre on the wall.

Except as an explanation of the fusty party's reference to a Major, Old
Jack--that was Sally's Major's name for him--got very little foothold
in her mind, until a recollection of her mother's allusion to him as an
old gossip having made her look for a suitable image to place there,
she suddenly recalled that it was he that had actually seen her father;
talked to him in India twenty years ago; could, and no doubt would,
tell her all about the divorce. But there!--she couldn't speak to him
about it here and now. It was impossible.

Still, she was curious to see him, and the fusty but genteel one had
evidently expected him. So, during the remainder of what seemed to
Sally the darkest day, morally and atmospherically, that she had ever
spent--all