erful. Sometimes he spoke
of them under terrible fire in their life-or-death push forward,
followed by the surgeons and stretcher-bearers. Sometimes, he had been
to the trenches to dress a wound that would not stop bleeding, but
always he wondered at seeing the resolute grit and calmness of these
young men, who had been the dandies in London drawing-rooms a year ago
and who were now smoking placidly in the trenches at Redan.

"What is it?" he asked an old surgeon, on whom he was waiting. "Is it
recklessness?"

"No, sir!" was the answer. "It is straight courage. Courage in the
blood. Courage nourished on their mother's milk. Courage educated into
them at Eton or Rugby, in many a fight and scuffle. Courage that
lived with them night and day at Oxford or Cambridge, and that made
them choose danger and death rather than be known for one moment as a
cad or a coward. It was dancing last year. It is fighting in a proper
quarrel this year. Different duties, that is all."

Every now and then Sunna dropped them letters about which there was
much pleasant speculating, for as the summer came forward, she began
to accept the disappointments made by the death of Boris, and to
consider what possibilities of life were still within her power. She
said in May that "she was sick and weary of everything about
Sebastopol, and that she wanted to go back to Scotland, far more
frantically than she ever wanted to leave it." In June, she said, she
had got her grandfather to listen to reason, but had been forced to
cry for what she wanted, a humiliation beyond all apologies.

Her next letter was written in Edinburgh, where she declared she
intended to stay for some time. Maximus Grant was in Edinburgh with
his little brother, who was under the care and treatment of an eminent
surgeon living there. "The poor little laddie is dying," she said,
"but I am able to help him over many bad hours, and Max is not
half-bad, that is, he might be worse if left to himself. Heigh-ho!
What varieties of men, and varieties of their trials, poor women have
to put up with!"

As the year advanced Sunna's letters grew bright and more and more
like her, and she described with admirable imitative piquancy the
literary atmosphere and conversation which is Edinburgh's native air.
In the month of November, little Eric went away suddenly, in a
paroxysm of military enthusiasm, dying literally the death of a
soldier "with tumult, with shouting, and with the sound of the