tea, he saw the two men lying there, with
their faces turned to each other, as if they had been lovers, and hand
holding hand. He took Polson by the wrist, and shook the grasp gently
asunder.

'You've got to take this, old chap,' he said, and setting down the
candle he carried, and fixing it by its own grease to the rough hospital
table at the bed head, he began to feed the boy once more.

You are not to imagine the ward silent all this time. There are valiant
souls of men passing with every hour, and groans of death and anguish,
and all the living axe conscious.

When Jervase had fed the Sergeant to the last teaspoonful, he retired
again, leaving the candle burning on the table at the bed head.

'These poor chaps,' he said, 'may find a little bit of comfort in a
light, and any way, good English wax don't stink like Turkish lamp oil,
does it, old chap?'

The 'old chap' winked. He had no strength to express himself in any
more emphatic manner; but he had got to love his father once again, for,
after all, the ties of blood are strong, and a man may have been a wrong
doer without giving his own son an eternal cause to hate him. And when
a man has a bullet hole through the neck, and has been unconscious for
many days, and delirious for many weeks, and finds a once familiar face
bending over him, habit asserts itself; and any hatred or despite which
may have come in between two people long ago is likely to be scattered.
It was a foreign air which howled about the gables and chimneys. It was
a foreign wind which wept and moaned about that abode of sorrow, and
drove the rain against the window panes. But to the boy, the feel of
whose father's hand was still warm in his own, it was home, home, home.
The candle dwindled down, and he had been watchful enough to prevent the
whole place being set on fire by waiting to blow out its final flame as
it drove towards the bare wood on which it rested. Darkness came down
and slumber with it; and then on the top of slumber a quiet whisper and
a dawning light which waked many men in the long bare corridor. There
was a candle carried by a hospital nurse in the sombre uniform of her
craft, and behind it came a lady whom every waking man there present
turned to thank, if it were only by a movement of the enfeebled hand,
or a droop of the eyelid, or a motion of the deadened lips. Men who are
dying after long sickness in hospital cannot cheer. Men who fall in
the full tide of the strength o