er faith.
The order "Fire!" came, but Sam, instead of obeying, threw down his
musket and ran forward, seized the photograph and kissed it. He looked
up, half expecting to see a crowd of spectators eying him with
derision. He cast himself upon his bed with his clothes on and tossed
about for a long time, until at last sleep came to his relief.

When he awoke in the morning the sun had long been up. In the first
moments of waking and before he opened his eyes, he could not recall
what it was that was troubling him. Suddenly the whole situation came
back to him, tenfold clearer than before. He saw at once beyond all
possibility of contradiction that he could not shoot Marian, no matter
who ordered him to do it; that for him the ideal of a perfect soldier
was altogether unattainable, and that he was obliged to admit to
himself that his entire life was a failure. The public might praise and
acclaim him, but he was essentially a fraud and could never secure his
own approval.

CHAPTER XIV

Home Again

[Illustration]

When Sam got up and began to undress to take his bath, his head swam so
that he was obliged to lie down again. He tried again two or three
times, but always with the same result, and finally he rang for a
servant and sent for an army surgeon. The doctor came at once, took his
temperature with a thermometer, and, after examining him, pronounced
that he had a bad attack of fever, probably typhoid. He advised him to
go to the hospital, and before noon Sam found himself comfortably
installed in a hospital bed, screened off by a movable partition from a
ward of fever patients. The doctor's surmise proved to be correct, and
for weeks he was dangerously ill, much of the time being delirious. He
suffered once or twice also from relapses, and showed very little
recuperative force when the fever finally left him. Meanwhile he was
very low-spirited. The idea preyed upon his mind that he was no soldier
and could never be one, and he felt that the resulting depression had a
great deal to do with his protracted illness. Cleary was assiduous in
his attentions, but, intimate as they were, Sam could never bring
himself to confess his culpable weakness to him. As he became
convalescent he had other visitors, and among them Mr. Cope, the
inventor of explosives and artillery.

"I am at work at a great invention which I shall owe partly to you and
partly to the Emperor," said he o