all. He was a
deserter, and they hunted him out."

"Well, and what is that to me, if they did?" He turned his face
away. "Isabel, my wife, is dead," he said slowly.

"Dead?"

"She is dead--and the child."

He bowed his face, while I gazed at him incredulous, sick at heart.

"If what you say is true," he said, lifting his eyes till, weary and
desperate, they met mine, "she has been avenged to-night."

"You shall see," I promised; and as the two soldiers picked me up and
laid me along a plank, I made signs that they were to carry me as I
directed. He nodded, and fell into pace beside my litter.

The body of Whitmore lay along the foot of the wall where it had
fallen. But when we drew near, it was not at the body that I stared,
putting out a hand and gripping Archibald Plinlimmon's arm.

On the balcony opposite, George Leicester still leaned forward and
grinned down into the street.

He did not move or glance aside even when Archibald commanded the men
to set me down; nor when he passed in at the open door and we waited;
nor again when he stepped out on the balcony and called him by name.
The corpse stared down still. For it was a corpse, with a woman's
bodkin-dagger driven tight home between the shoulder-blades.

And so, by an unknown sister's hand, Isabel's wrongs had earthly
vengeance.

CHAPTER XXIV.

I EXCHANGE THE LAUREL FOR THE OLIVE.

Thus, in hospital in Ciudad Rodrigo, ended my first campaign; and
here in a few words may end my story. The surgeons, having their
hands full, and detecting no opportunities of credit in a small
bugler with a splintered ankle, sent me down to Belem, splinters and
splints and all, to recover: and at Belem hospital, just as the
surgeons were beginning to congratulate themselves that, although
never likely to be fit again for active service, I might in time make
a fairly active hospital orderly, the splinters began to work through
the flesh; and for two months I lay on my back in bed and suffered
more pain than has been packed into the rest of my life.

The curious part of it was that, having extracted the final splinter,
they promptly invalided me home. From the day I limped on board the
_Cumberland_ transport in the Tagus, leaning on two crutches, I began
to mend: and within twelve months--as may hereafter be recounted--I
was back again, hale and hearty, marching with no perceptible limp,
on the soil of Spain.

But I must not, after all, conclude in thi