welling is half a mile up the road beyond the new
church. God be with you, young man, and be kind to that wounded one.'

When the Widow Summermatter had departed I sat down in Peter's
arm-chair and took stock of the place. It was quiet and simple and
homely, and through the window came the gleam of snow on the diamond
hills. On the table beside the stove were Peter's cherished
belongings--his buck-skin pouch and the pipe which Jannie Grobelaar had
carved for him in St Helena, an aluminium field match-box I had given
him, a cheap large-print Bible such as padres present to well-disposed
privates, and an old battered _Pilgrim's Progress_ with gaudy pictures.
The illustration at which I opened showed Faithful going up to Heaven
from the fire of Vanity Fair like a woodcock that has just been
flushed. Everything in the room was exquisitely neat, and I knew that
that was Peter and not the Widow Summermatter. On a peg behind the door
hung his much-mended coat, and sticking out of a pocket I recognized a
sheaf of my own letters. In one corner stood something which I had
forgotten about--an invalid chair.

The sight of Peter's plain little oddments made me feel solemn. I
wondered if his eyes would be like Mary's now, for I could not conceive
what life would be for him as a cripple. Very silently I opened the
bedroom door and slipped inside.

He was lying on a camp bedstead with one of those striped Swiss
blankets pulled up round his ears, and he was asleep. It was the old
Peter beyond doubt. He had the hunter's gift of breathing evenly
through his nose, and the white scar on the deep brown of his forehead
was what I had always remembered. The only change since I last saw him
was that he had let his beard grow again, and it was grey.

As I looked at him the remembrance of all we had been through together
flooded back upon me, and I could have cried with joy at being beside
him. Women, bless their hearts! can never know what long comradeship
means to men; it is something not in their lives--something that
belongs only to that wild, undomesticated world which we forswear when
we find our mates. Even Mary understood only a bit of it. I had just
won her love, which was the greatest thing that ever came my way, but
if she had entered at that moment I would scarcely have turned my head.
I was back again in the old life and was not thinking of the new.

Suddenly I saw that Peter was awake and was looking at me.

'Dick,' he said in