ond attempt for liberty, a fall from the ramparts had
cost him his leg.

But worse than all his incarceration had been the final tramp through
France--right away north to Valenciennes; then left-about-turn, three
hundred and fifty miles to Tours; then south-east to Riou; and from
Riou south-west to Bordeaux, where the transport took him off--one of
six transports for about fifteen hundred released prisoners. All the
way, too, on a wooden leg! Heaven knows how bitterly he had come to
hate that leg. Yet his heart, hardened though it was by all this
long adversity, had melted as the _Romney_ transport beat up closer
and closer for England, and at sight of Plymouth heights he had
broken into tears.

Troy! Troy! After all, Troy would remember him. Though he knew it
brought him nearer to freedom, all that marching through France had
been a weariness eating into his soul. Now a free man, along the
road from Plymouth to Troy he had almost skipped.

And this had been his homecoming!

They remembered him. Beyond all his hopes they remembered him.
In their memory he had grown into a Homeric man, a demi-god. He had
only to declare himself. . . .

The Major lay on his hospital bed and stared at the ceiling. It was
all very well, but ten years had made a difference--a mighty
difference; a difference which beat all his calculations. It was a
double difference, too; for all the while that he had been shrinking
in self-knowledge, his reputation at home had been expanding like a
cucumber.

Good Lord! How could he live up to it now? To obey his impulses and
declare himself was simple enough, perhaps; but afterwards--

He had nearly betrayed himself when Cai Tamblyn--in a queer
straight-cut frock-coat of livery, blue with brass buttons, but
otherwise looking much the same as ever--thrust his head in at the
door.

In the first shock of astonishment the Major had almost cried out on
him by name.

"Why--eh?--what are _you_ doing here?" he stammered. Hitherto he had
been waited on by a strange doctor (Hansombody's new partner) and a
nurse whom he had assisted twelve years ago, when she was left a
widow, to set up as a midwife.

"Might ask the same question of you," said Cai Tamblyn. "I'm the
kew-rator, havin' been Hymen's servant in the old days, and shows
around the visitors, besides dustin' the mementoes--locks of his
bloomin' 'air and the rest of the trash, I looked in to see how you
was a-gettin' on after th