out things just now.'

Again there was a silence, and it lasted for a full hour. The rank
petroleum lamp in the sconce burnt out and left a sickening stench upon
the air. The whole space in which the wounded men lay went dark, and
the wild free wind and the cruel driving rain beat at the window. In the
black darkness voices spoke here and there. There were notes of fever
from wounded men, and once or twice there was a last message whispered
to a nurse's ear, never to be delivered. Dark and storm, and the heroic
long-suffering soul released from the heroic long-suffering body, and
going home at midnight.

Sick men who have been half-starved for a year or two, and who have run
through every note of the gamut of emotion, may be quicker to appreciate
these influences than common people are: but Polson Jervase, lying
on his back and staring upwards in a futile endeavour to trace the
semi-circular ring of smoke upon the ceiling, felt them all deeply.

Whilst he lay there, staring upwards, there was a sudden patter of bare
feet on the bare floor at his side, and a hand clutched him.

'Look here,' said Major de Blacquaire, and even in his half dream he
knew the voice instantly, as if he had been wide awake and the room had
lain in broad daylight. 'Look here, what the devil did you do it for?'

'Get back into bed,' said Polson, 'and I'll try to talk to you.'

The beds were not more than twenty inches in width, and there was barely
a foot between them, so that a man by the stretching of a hand could
touch a comrade.

Out of the dark, to the Sergeant's intense surprise, there came a
groping hand, which sought his own, and found it and Clutched it.

'What the devil did you do it for?' said De Blacquaire.

'Well,' said the wounded Sergeant, 'it's pretty hard to say. I suppose
it's a mixed-up kind of thing altogether. I saw you drop, and you
promised to break me in the morning, and if I'd let your chance go by,
d'ye see----'

'See! 'said De Blacquaire, holding on to the hand in the darkness.
'You're not half a bad fellow, Jervase.'

'Ain't I?' said Jervase. 'You go on like this, Major, and I shall begin
to think that you're a better sort than I fancied you were.'

The two men went to sleep together, each holding the other's hand. It
was an odd thing, and quite unlikely to have been prophesied by anybody;
but it happened.

An hour or two later, when the elder Jervase stole in on tiptoe, with
a new cup of priceless beef-