did. If she had ever dreamed of the exquisite torture the flowers and

their scent were to Trevelyan, she would have placed them with the others down stairs, but Trevelyan never told, and she never knew the moments in which the perfume seemed to drive him mad.

Once she suggested getting a professional nurse to relieve him, but catching sight of Trevelyan’s face she had stopped short.

"There! Forgive me," she said. "It is not that I don’t trust you, or am ungrateful or believe that anyone else could do so well, but I am afraid for you."

"I’m all right," Trevelyan had answered shortly.

"You are unselfish; you are only thinking of us and of John. You are always thinking and doing for John."

"Don’t!" he interrupted, and through the dimness of the room she could see that his face quivered, and she wondered.

"I could not get along without you," she went on. "None of us could, and it has been you who have pulled him through so far."

She looked toward the long, motionless figure on the bed.

"I shall pull him through to-night and to-morrow, and to-morrow again, and next week—until he is out of danger," said Trevleyan.

That was the day the two doctors had given Stewart up.

The crisis came and passed, and Stewart lived.

When the thralldom and the stupor of the fever had partly lifted, and before Stewart came to himself, Trevelyan left and went back to Scotland and to old Mactier, nor could anyone persuade him to remain.

Days later, when Stewart was sitting up, he saw Cary for the first time.

"There is some one waiting outside whom you will be glad to see," his mother had said.

"It is Cary? You are going to let me see Cary?" he cried.

"If you will be good and not talk," she answered, leaving the door ajar.

Stewart turned his face to the door, pressing his long, thin fingers resting on his knee, close together.

She came in carrying a bunch of violets, and stood by his chair, looking down at him. He looked up at her, and it seemed to him that she was beautiful, and her voice the sweetest he had ever heard.

"I have waited and wanted so to give you these myself," she said, "and you have frightened us all so."

She spoke with the simplicity of a little girl, but there was a quality in her voice that Stewart had not heard before, and he knew that Cary had become a woman.

He clung to her hand in parting with that pathetic bodily weakness that makes a man, in illness, like a child.

"Don’t go yet," he pleaded, "You’ve been here such a little while. Oh, _please_ don’t go!"

She patted his hand.

"I will come again," she said, and on her way to the door, she kept looking back at him and smiling. He sat motionless until her light footstep was lost in the distance, and all day he sat quiet, scarcely speaking, dreaming of her.

The next day he waited, expecting her, but she did not come; nor the next.

"What’s become of Cary?" he asked on the third day of his mother. "Why don’t she come any more?"

"I suppose she thinks you’re out of danger now, and she may have other things to do."

"If that isn’t just the way of women! Coming all the time when a chap don’t know anything or anybody, and then just when he needs cheering—" he broke off, pulling viciously at the shawl over his feet.

His mother smiled, knowing better "the way of women."

But two days later, when Cary called again, she spoke to her of his loneliness.

"He gets tired of the home faces," she said, "and he isn’t strong enough yet to see the men or strangers. Perhaps if you could read aloud to him now and then——"

"Why, of course I could," said Cary, and after that she came oftener. They would carry Stewart down to his mother’s cheerful little sitting room, and there one or more of the family would gather and Cary would talk or read aloud. At such times Stewart would lean back in his chair among his pillows and remain silent, content to look at her and to listen to her voice. One day they were left alone together. He remained quiet, his eyes fixed on her. Presently she finished the chapter and turned the page.

"I think that was a pretty strong scene, don’t you?" she asked, pausing for a moment before she went on, and peering at him gravely over the top of the book.

"Yes—it was," he answered absently.

"You weren’t listening to a word of it," she exclaimed reproachfully.

He laughed.

"To tell you the truth—no. Put the wretched old thing down and talk to me."

She laid the book down as he had bidden, but she played nervously with the leaves.

"What shall I talk about?"

"Oh, anything—yourself."

"Upon my word, but you’re polite. There isn’t an earthly thing to tell about myself," she added, "And I don’t know any topic that would interest you. There’s that House of Commons speech, of course, but——"

"Then I’ll talk to you."

"Oh, you _mustn’t_!" She looked up startled, "Sir Archibald said you were not to exert yourself."

"Confound the old codger, anyway! Does he expect to keep me tongue-tied the rest of my life?"

Cary laughed.

"You’re cross to-day," she said. "You’re getting better. It’s a sure sign."

Stewart leaned forward suddenly; then he leaned back and traced an outline of a sword on the leather arm of the chair.

"Did you know," he asked her slowly, "that as far as the Service is concerned, I’m done for—that I’ll never be well enough for it again; that I’ve been injured beyond hope for the Service; that I’ve had to resign?"

"Yes," said Cary gently, looking hard at the book in her lap.

"Thirty and—done for," he said bitterly, "All the Woolwich years to count for nothing; all the study; all the ambition, all the—hope, to count for nothing!" His finger paused in tracing the outline of the sword.

"Oh, you mustn’t say that," cried Cary, "you must remember what you’ve done already—more than many older officers do in their whole lives. And then—"

He interrupted her.

"That sounds well," he said. "But life isn’t worth much to a man when he’s laid on the shelf just when he’s beginning to live— But the wasted years and the inactive life ahead!" He went on rapidly, beating the fist of one hand against the palm of the other. "Oh, think what inactivity will mean after the life I’ve been trained to, and worked for, and loved!"

She sat silent, her heart throbbing with a great pity.

"To have to think of myself—to look out for draughts like a sickly, nervous old man!" Something rose in Stewart’s throat, and he coughed. "Can’t ever command the men again! Can’t lead them to battle, or ever feel the soft earth under me, or see the stars and the night through the flap of my tent! To have to give up trying to be something, or do something—at thirty!"

He stopped short.

The book fell from Cary’s lap to the floor, and she stooped to pick it up with swimming eyes. He caught sight of her face and he leaned forward; all the anger and all the resentment gone from his voice—melted by her tears.

"Bah!" he said, "That’s just about the fate I’m fit for if I haven’t got any more grit than that! Of course I didn’t mean it, and you must try and forget it. Of course the Service is out of the question, but I _will_ make something of my life! And I’m awfully glad, too, for what I’ve had of it, and—been allowed to do. I’m glad for the Woolwich years and—and the training—and—all that! Of course it hasn’t been lost. And I’m glad I’ve done something for the Service—even in a little way, and saved—" he caught himself up suddenly.

Cary rose, her tears dried by the burning fever in her eyes. She finished the sentence.

"Saved Robert from exposure!"

He looked up quickly.

"I—I don’t understand you."

"Oh, yes, you do too," said Cary, breathing hard. "You think I don’t know all about it! I do, though!"

"How?"

"Robert told me himself."

Stewart drew a deep breath and looked away. There was a long silence in the room. After awhile she went up to the big leather chair and laid one hand on the back of it and bent her head, looking down at him.

"Johnny?"

He looked up, his firm mouth working.

"Johnny, you’re the best man that ever lived!"

"Oh, Cary!" he said, and he tried to laugh.

She nodded decidedly.

"But I know. Robert told me what you’d been to him, and—he didn’t spare himself."

Stewart stared straight ahead of him.

"Poor Rob," he said. "Poor boy!"

Cary moved off to the window and looked out, absent-mindedly, folding the edge of the curtain with her fingers.

"It’s all like a terrible dream," she said slowly, "and I keep thinking I’ll awake. It doesn’t seem possible. I keep remembering the time he saved us in that awful storm, years ago at home, and—it—doesn’t—seem—possible!"

"No, but it’s all too true," said Stewart.

Cary wheeled around, facing the room.

"And I am responsible. It was through his love for me!" she cried.

Stewart shook his head.

"You tried to help him. I tried to help him—all the fellows did, but he just let himself go. When a man like that wants something, he sweeps everything out of his way and rushes on blindly."

"Oh, but it was the love for me!" said Cary; then suddenly: "How you shielded him!"

"Do you think I did right? After all, perhaps, I wasn’t meant for the Service. If I had done all my duty—"

"I think you did right," said Cary, looking down with grave eyes at her locked fingers, and she came back into the room and sat down, "Shall I tell you why I think so?"

"Yes."

"No exposure could remedy the hurt he gave himself—to his own manhood and his own honor—" she broke off, and then went on hurriedly. "Oh, if he could only have realized what that meant—keeping his honor clean—" she broke off again, and Stewart looked away so that he might not see her face. She went on.

"The survey was made all right and so it was not the hurt to the Service it might have been, but only to himself; and your punishment in forcing him to resign was severe enough! His own remorse makes up the rest, and the two may bring him another chance." She paused.

Stewart leaned his head on his hand, his elbow on the arm of the chair, and looked fixedly off into space.

"Perhaps you’re right—I guess you are," he said, slowly. "I thought something like that at the time. It may be the saving of him. I didn’t do an officer’s whole duty, but I tried to be just. I tried to spare him and—and—" he hesitated, "those at home. I suppose another man might have told. I just held my tongue. It was an accident—my seeing. I was worried over the boy and couldn’t keep away—" he was speaking disjointedly. "I loved the Service. God! how I loved it, and I couldn’t bear that he might really harm it some time, so I made him get out. But I couldn’t disgrace him; have him court-marshaled and cashiered, or—or pay the penalty—" he broke off, and Cary rose to go.

"He is paying the penalty," she said. "He pays it with every breath he draws."

"Yes; and they tell me that twice he has nursed me and saved me, and I never knew!"

Cary looked down thoughtfully at Stewart’s thin hand resting on the arm of the chair, and Stewart looked at her and the silence grew and grew. If only he knew whether——

She looked up quickly, as though divining his thoughts, and she flushed a little.

"We will keep the secret," she said, "you and I—won’t we? And we will try and help him? Do you know, I believe he’ll take his ambition and courage and—love," the flush mounted higher, "and remould his life?" She hesitated, "Even hopeless love—" and then she broke off, turning her face away. Stewart did not speak or move.

"Then it isn’t Robert," he said to himself after she had gone, "Then—it—isn’t—Robert!"

*V.*

Weeks later, when Stewart was able, he went around to see Cary.

"It’s a dreadful pull—up those stairs," said Cary, rolling forward a chair and looking anxiously at Stewart as he stood wan and breathless, but smiling, in the doorway.

"It never used to be," he panted, sitting down.

His eyes wandered about the room.

"Jove, but it’s good to get back here! And you haven’t changed things a bit—even the Psyche in her old place! And the little tea kettle—Jove!"

He leaned back restfully.

She laughed and watched him in silence.

"I’ll miss it all like the dickens!"

She looked up quickly from the flowers she was just beginning to arrange.

"You are not going away, are you?" she asked.

He nodded and sighed.

"Home—to Scotland. The lease on the place has run out, and they think country air will brace me up a bit—so we’re going. It’ll seem queer to get back there after all these years."

"You—you’re going to give up the Grosvenor Square house?"

"Yes. I suppose, though, we’ll come back every year for the season and take a suite at the Langham or the Buckingham Gate. Father has an idea that he’ll put me through a course of politics up there, when we’re alone, and there’s nothing going on." Stewart smiled mirthlessly.

"You are thinking of going into politics, when you get strong?" asked Cary for something to say. A sudden unutterable homesickness had swept over her.

"I’m not sure—it isn’t unlikely though. I suppose that’s as good a way to serve the country as half a man can—perhaps a little better—to try and help keep one detail of the government’s work clean! Father has set his heart on the Diplomatic service for me."

"I should think you’d like that," said Cary. Talking to-day for some reason was an effort.

"I’m not sure. What are you and the Captain going to do with yourselves?"

Cary leaned against the back of a chair, tearing a stray rose leaf to pieces. She looked down at it as she spoke.

"Papa wants another tramp through the Alps. I’m not in the mood for tramping, but he’s been so good I can’t say a word. When we’ve climbed Mont Blanc again and come down, I think I’ll get Daddy to take me home. I think I’m a little mite homesick."

She turned quickly and buried her face in the roses. An odd light sprang to Stewart’s eyes.

"Haven’t you been happy in England?" he asked.

Cary lifted her head, her face dyed with the deep red of the roses.

"Happy! There’s no place like England—except America," she said. "I love every stone in England—in the United Kingdom! Months ago Daddy and I spent a July in Hertfordshire. I can see it all now; the glorious green of everything; the undulating country and the woods and the scattered old cottages, with the village in the distance and the church spire showing, and the little river and the cornfields and the poppies!" She breathed quicker. "There is only one thing sweeter I know—the old fort at home and the long beach and the sea."

She stopped, and the red of the roses faded. She went on slowly.

"Yes, I guess I’m a little bit homesick, for the beach and the sea."

"Do you remember when we were crossing I asked you to let me take you to my home in Scotland when the homesickness came?" asked Stewart. "You might come to us when the Captain is re-climbing Mont Blanc."

He paused, waiting for an answer, but Cary was silent.

"Wouldn’t you come?"

She threw the last bit of the torn leaf away and came toward him and stopped, her hands on the back of a chair, a smile creeping into her eyes.

"I might—if I was asked," she said demurely.

He laughed like a boy.

"Mother’ll see to that."

"She’ll have to," said Cary, tossing her head.

"But you’d still be homesick?"

She wrinkled up her forehead.

"Goodness, even Scotland isn’t America," she answered. "Why, I suppose I would—some!"

Stewart closed the carriage door decidedly. Then he leaned back and stared into the mirror opposite, addressing the reflection there. The odd light had come back to his eyes.

"It’s what I’ve been waiting for," he said, speaking aloud and slowly; "it’s what I’ve been waiting for all these years. She’s homesick, and she shall come home—to me."

*VI.*

To Trevelyan, up in Scotland, each day evolved itself into an eternity. There were the lonely breakfasts in the mornings; the lonely walks about the grounds, or out on the steep, bare crags; the lonely lunches; the lonely afternoons spent in wandering around the silent house; the lonelier evenings in which the unread book would drop from his hand to the floor, and he would stare absently into the shadows; the lonely wakeful nights—it was always loneliness.

Old Mactier would often pause in his morning work and look after the solitary figure and ponder and shake his head before he went back to his duties. Trevelyan sometimes used to stop by him and talk to him a little before he resumed his walk. Once he carried Mactier off to the moorlands for a week’s shooting and Mactier was actually conscious that Trevelyan seemed happier with his gun under his arm again than he had been since the day of his mysterious return.

It was Trevelyan, not Mactier, who led the hunt in those days, and the old man would press after him, sometimes stumbling with the fatigue he was too proud to acknowledge, and glorying in the prowess of the great strong figure ahead, that he had carried as a child and in whose hands he had placed the first firearms—almost before the child was strong enough to hold the weapon or could pull the trigger by himself.

If Trevelyan exhausted the old retainer, he tired himself too, and at night he would drop, almost too weary to take off his hunting boots, and go to sleep, and sleep heavily, dreamlessly, as he had not done for weeks.

It was a relief, that, to get away from the haunting shadow in his dreams; and he blessed passionately the fatigue that brought even for so brief a time, forgetfulness.

At the end of the week he and Mactier went home, and the inactivity and the loneliness and the sleeplessness grew greater than before.

There was no face of his own kind to greet him here, in Scotland; the Camerons were his nearest neighbors, and the Camerons were away—Tom in Aberdeen. There was no one to help him, even if they could, to beat back the blind despair that threatened him with mental and with moral death.

One day he ordered out the hounds and rode across country until the fields and trees and fences became blurred together by the touch of twilight. He returned mud stained and mortally weary and stalked into the dining room and over to the sideboard, where he locked his table wines. He took out a decanter and hunted around for a glass, and carried both into the library, and sat down. Then he poured some of the wine and swallowed it at a mouthful. He filled the glass again and drank the liquor leisurely, lounging back in his chair with a sigh of content. After all, he declared, there was nothing like a bracer when a chap was fagged out.

By and by, he slipped down a little in his chair and stretched his legs, still encased in their mud-stained boots, straight out in front of him and went to sleep. When he awoke it was quite dark, and he sat still, staring through the uncurtained window into the night, and conscious of a delicious languor. Then as his faculties became more acute and the old spectre returned to haunt him, he instinctively stretched forth his hand in the blackness and fumbled for the decanter and the glass. He drunk deeply once, twice, three times—and when he raised the glass for the fourth time his hand shook and there was an odd rushing sound in his head.

Suddenly he sat forward in his chair, pushed the glass and decanter from him roughly and flung out his arms across the table. The odd rushing sound subsided, and he became aware that the wine was dripping from the table to the floor, where he had overturned the decanter.

He did not refill it, and the sideboard remained unlocked—and empty.

So the days passed. He would climb up into the eyrie, as he had done as a child and listen to the beating sea below. Once the sea had sung to him of undiscovered lands, whose shores it touched, bearing the message back to him; it had sung of wealth and fame gained by the sword—it was by the sword always—and it had beaten and beaten, and sung of all that he would one day like to be; and of what some day he would be and achieve. Once it had sung of love—of its mystery and the essence of its life—

Now—

He would crawl to the edge of the crag and peer over into the white foam, holding on to the edge until the old boyish dizziness came back; but unlike in the old days, there was never a woman’s face in the foam now. What right had he to look for a woman’s face in the foam!

And the song of the sea was the song of death and dishonor. He might climb the crag to-day, and to-morrow, and every to-morrow of his life, and the song would not change. The sea was a vast organ; he could not change its tunes back to the old ones; he could not control it, and it went on, rolling out its fierce, deep music of dishonor.

And then he would leave the sea and the crags and go back into the empty house. The house was only a shade less bad; with its deserted rooms and its long gallery of dead and gone Campbells and Trevelyans.

He had wandered into the gallery once or twice. The faces on the canvases, grown indistinct with the years, seemed to look back at him without recognition that he was of their race and line. What claim had they on him or he on them? The men had been brave and the women fair—so the history and traditions of the house had said, even if the stiff painted figures and the severe painted faces often said otherwise—the men had always been in the front wherever they were needed for the defense of Scotland and her rights, and later they had defended England too. If they had not fought for her with the sword, they had with tongue or pen—if they had not been soldiers, they had been powers in the government or in the pulpit. Even the solemn-faced preacher near the big window at the furthest end of the gallery, when eloquence had failed, had left the old kirk to strike a blow for King Charlie. The women, too, had been brave—brave in the sacrifice of beauty and wealth for the upholding of Scottish rights, and the renouncing of husbands and lovers and sons for Scotland.

At the other side of the gallery hung his father’s race—the Trevelyans; and opposite the solemn-faced preacher, near to the window where the sun struck it in the morning, was the picture of his mother. It had been taken of her in the first years of her marriage, soon after he had been born. People had said that, as a child, he had held his head proudly, like hers.

The grave, smiling eyes seemed to follow him as he turned hastily from the portrait. She had gloried in the traditions of her race; she had been proud—justly—of her line. He thanked God she was dead—that he might remember her as the portrait had painted her to be—on the flood tide of her love and her beauty and her strength.

There was the picture of his father, in his full regimentals. He had been years older than his wife, but how they had loved each other; how proud they had been of each other’s race, and how proud they had been of him. He was glad that his father was traveling in the Far East and had not seen him or demanded explanations since his return. He would have been obliged to meet the questionings with silence. It was better so.

Between the two portraits hung one of himself as a child. How his father and mother had watched the growing of the portrait under the master’s brush, waiting for its completion, that it might be hung in the gallery. It had been painted the year his mother had died—a year before he went to America. The artist had taken something of the grace and alertness of the great hound that had rested at the boy’s feet and put it into the supple limbs of the boy himself. He had painted into the boy’s eyes the reflection of the gray stormy sea, and had lent them something of the gray sea’s strength.

And he had been like that as a child, with all the promise of a ripe manhood! And now that he had grown to be a man——

There was a long stretch of empty wall space next to the portrait of his father, and his father had once laughingly told him that his portrait should hang there, painted in uniform, when he had left Woolwich and won his spurs and returned after seeing service.

And he had returned from service without the uniform!

He had used to come and dream here after the Woolwich years, whenever he could get off from duty or was not with Cary. He had come here often in that winter when Cary was away in France. And he had planned his portrait hanging so, in uniform, with hers near his—even as his mother’s was near his father’s. And sometimes when the sun had gone and the darkness had crept in, the shadows had taken other forms—the forms of children—who would troop up and take their places on the empty spaces waiting for them on the wall.

He had dreamed of her—-of Cary—as a strong passionate nature dreams of its best beloved. He had fancied her in a hundred different guises—at the head of his table, moving around the house, as its mistress, talking to old Mactier and his tenantry, as the master’s wife; he had dreamed of her, after he and she had lived together alone for a period of ineffable bliss, as the mother of his children; strong sons and fair daughters, that would reflect her sweetness and his strength—the completion of their love. He had dreamed of the time when the house would ring with their voices, and then of the days when the house had lapsed into silence again, when learning love’s mystery they had gone to homes of their own; when he and she would live on in a love that time could not change, nor age wither; how later she would lay him in the tomb of his ancestors, and later still they would put her close beside him and his people. He had never dreamed of her dying first, or of his life without her.

And now, she had gone from his life, and the dreams had gone; and he had shattered the hopes with his own hand. He would never feel her in his arms, or lean down and rest the hollow of his cheek against her hair; he would never see her moving around the house, or watch her shadow as she passed. She would never rest beside him in the vault.

The house would remain silent in the years that stretched ahead, as it had remained silent in the years that lay behind. There would never be again even the dream echoes of the children’s voices. His portrait—in uniform—would never hang upon the wall; the space where he had dreamed her pictured face would look down into his living one, would be left empty; and the shadows would never take the forms of little children, and only the grim shadow-curtain of darkness would stretch across the barren wall.

And he would leave the gallery and go into the desolate library, where he and she had stood that day of the storm, and he would sit down and bow his face on the big, carved table, wondering what was the answer to the twisted riddle of his life.

He had told himself he would pick up the broken pieces and remould them for England and the Service, and he had thought to learn the answer here—at home, in Scotland, by the crags and sea.

But Scotland had not answered him.

*VII.*

Trevelyan let the hand that held Mackenzie’s letter fall between his sprawling legs.

He had been sitting on the front steps of the house when Mactier had brought him his mail and he had opened it there.

There were the papers, and a half dozen bills, a wedding invitation, two sets of reception cards, the announcement of a club meeting, and a letter from his aunt in eastern Scotland, begging him to come to them, if only for a week, and telling him that Cary was with them, and—Mackenzie’s letter.

He had laid it aside to open last. It might have been he wanted to take his time reading it; or a dread of hearing from any of the old mess. At any rate, he hesitated before opening it, even when he had disposed of the rest of the mail.

He read it after awhile, and then he raised his head and looked hard at the group of trees near the house.

And so Mackenzie had been transferred to a distant regiment soon after he, Trevelyan, had resigned. There were a good many pages given to the description of the new Station and the new set of officers and men, that Trevelyan skipped over hastily. It was only the last part that had struck him suddenly, like a heavy blow in the face, and that made him, after awhile, pick up the letter and re-read the part.

"We had a cholera scare this season, but we managed to strangle it, so that it never became more than local, but it kept Clarke—he’s my assistant, and a good chap he is—and me, on the jump for a time. The natives won’t look out for the water, and I don’t believe the entire medical and military force of the United Kingdom combined would be able to make them do so! And of course it’s damnation in this special spot where there is more or less cholera every year. I sometimes feel inclined to say if they’re such fools let them drink and bathe and drown themselves in the water, for they’re not worth saving. But you see, unless the scourge is stamped out among them it goes on spreading and threatens the barracks. We can’t spare one of our dandy men. We need ’em all in the Service—every last mother’s son of ’em, bless their stout old British hearts!

"You saw a case or two at the old Station, and you know something of what it means. But you haven’t any idea of an army surgeon’s dread of an epidemic—that is a surgeon who has been through the cholera mill. I know, for I’ve spent most of my term in India, and years ago I was in the midst of a howling time of it—men dropping off by the score! I never want to go through such a thing again. The horror of it is enough to last a man a good deal longer than his natural life—and the chaps who helped me! Well, most of the men who could—and they were brave men, too—took to heels, and the handful that buckled to, to nurse, kept getting sick from fatigue and the vile water—and then when the men died—the fires—

"There, you know it, I suppose, or you’ve heard of it before. No one _knows_ it, until one’s been through it.

"The natives were pretty good on the whole a few months ago and so we stamped it out then. Jove! some of them were sick, though—sicker than the sickest dog you ever saw—. There was one fellow—he was worth saving—and I never worked so hard over a man in my life, except Stewart when he was hurt at the old Station. He died, though. All the while I kept thinking of that time with Stewart, and how you brought him back from death. I’ve never understood that, and I never learned anything like it in my _Materia Médica_. It was kind of uncanny, but it did the work. I wondered if you could have done something for that fellow. I couldn’t. He was a Scotchman, by the way, of the rank and file."

Here the letter stopped. On a fresh sheet was a postscript.

"Just came across this in my desk—two months old. I must have thought I had sent it and didn’t. Guess I’ll let it go though. Now that the immediate cholera scare is over the natives are playing the dickens again with the water—as they always do. It begins to look like trouble. When the spring rains come it’ll play the devil with the Service this time. Well!"

Trevelyan put down the letter. There was an odd fullness in his throat.

He got up and began to walk to and fro. Once he stopped and kicked at the gravel of the drive with his heel. The odd fullness in his throat grew, and it seemed to him as though an invisible force was impelling him to India.

Then he gripped at his self-control, and quieted his throbbing brain by his will. There should be no impetuous passion to lead him wrongly here. He would weigh the risks; he would force himself to think of all it meant—of all the horror of the details—the horrors that were unspeakable, almost unthinkable. He had seen something of them when he was at the Station. Whatever his decision there should be no regrets.

All day he wandered around the place—preoccupied. He did not touch his lunch, and he scarcely touched his dinner.

In the evening he went into the great library and thought it out—alone.

Had the dreams come to this? Was this the answer?

_Was it the answer?_

He sat rigid and mute questioning the silence, but the silence gave back no answer.

Outside the stars appeared one by one, only to hide themselves behind the mist that slowly had arisen, and the cold chill of midnight crept in through the closed windows. The fire on the hearth faded from its steady glow of gold to the red of the dying embers, and the student lamp on the table flickered and went out. And still Trevelyan sat rigid and mute, with his wide eyes questioning the silence.

By and by the silence became alive, and was peopled with the visions of his thoughts. He remembered what those cholera cases were, he had seen in India—the unutterableness of it all—and there swept over him not so much the abhorrence of death as of its manifestation. After all, was it not wholly the close contact with the disease itself he shrank from? Death——

Why, death was not so bad.

And Trevelyan’s tense features relaxed a little.

After all, he would not go to court death. He had lived through that desire and conquered it the night he had lain wounded by his own hand in the military hospital. Foolhardiness was not courage, so he had told himself then, and so he believed now.

Then, it was not likely that he would catch the plague and die. He had always laughed at disease; he who had never been ill; and had not Mackenzie lived through one of the worst epidemics on record—this promised to be mild, as compared to it. It was not so much the fear of death and disease, but was he willing to accept both if they came?

The old passionate love of life he had felt years ago when a boy, fighting the storm and the sea and death, shot through him and thrilled him from his throbbing head to his feet. He rose and flung out his arms and bent them backwards and forwards. He could feel the flow of the blood and the _life_ that was there.

Then he thought of Mackenzie’s letter and he pictured the oncoming of the cholera, and Mackenzie and his little band fighting the scourge unaided. What was the strength of his life for if not to serve these; if not to serve the men who served England! Might he not so serve England, too, and help to save, perhaps, the lives of those who fought in her defense and for her honor?

It would be service, but it would not be the service he had dreamed of as a child, and striven for as a boy and a youth. He had thought to serve with the sword, and perhaps—so he had dreamed—meet death in a charge like the charge his father had made. His blood had thrilled at the thought of the rally, and the command he would send down the line!

Trevelyan fumbled in the dark for his chair, and sat down.

It would never be that. If he should die serving Mackenzie and England what he had done would die with him. He might be mentioned in the Reports, but Reports—

Well; why not? What had he done for England that England should remember him? He had only served England in dishonor.

"When the men died—the fires—"

It would not even mean that he could be brought back here—to Scotland, to his crags and sea—to rest in the old vault. That last dream would have to fade even as the other dreams had faded.

He might not serve England gloriously; he might help the Service only indirectly, but would not the service and the help be there? Might he not so pick up the broken pieces?

Still the silence gave back no answer.

The wan gray dawn stole in through the lifting mist and found him wide-eyed and sleepless still.

After awhile he rose again and stretched his stiff legs and went down the hall to the front door and opened it. The chill of the early dawn struck him and he shivered. He walked down to the sea and stood there, looking out over the gray, cold waste of waters, and then he climbed to the eyrie, and looked out over the waters again. They seemed colder and grayer than before, and from force of habit he crawled to the ledge and leaned over. The _swish_, s-w-i-s-h, of the breakers below reached him, and through the faint mist he could see the white foam. The toss of the spray touched his face in friendly greeting as it had done so often—so often before.

The faintest touch of shell-like pink crept into the gray sky and deepened, and was reflected on the sea, and still Trevelyan lingered. The old passionate strength of the boy-child came back to him then, as he hung, listening to the beat of the sea. The self-assurance had gone from the courage, and had been crushed beyond restoration when he had broken the clay; but the courage was there—born afresh—unyielding and enduring and deep as the sea.

He rose to his feet and he flung out his arms toward the sea as he had done when he had beaten it and the storm and death, in Cary’s home, as a child; but he said nothing, for the odd fullness in his throat. Let death come so, his heart cried. Death, even when it strikes, does not always conquer, and Death was not all.

Then he climbed down and went back to the house, and up-stairs and flung himself on his bed.

The sea had answered his questionings.

_Thus_ would he serve the Service.

*VIII.*

It was late in the forenoon when Trevelyan awoke. He lay still awhile listening to the beat of the sea on the crags. The music of the waters had been his reveille since a child, when he had used to get up with the break of the day. The old triumphant note that had been missing in the sea’s song so long was in it to-day. He did not define it, but he was acutely conscious of its presence, and it haunted him while dressing and all during his lonely breakfast.

Then he went up-stairs and got his Gladstone and rummaged through his bureau drawers and closets, preparing for a short journey. Later, he sent for Mactier.

The old man came at once and stood in the doorway respectful and silent, watching his master pack.

"Is that you, Mactier? Well, I’m off again. I’m going to run over to Mr. John’s. I’ll be back day after to-morrow or the next—sure."

Mactier twirled his cap around and around with his hands, and looked down at it hard.

"Ay, sir."

"I’ll come right back from there," Trevelyan went on, sorting collars, as he spoke, "and then I’ll go over the accounts with you and see what the tenants want. I’m going back to India as soon as I can get there."

Mactier’s stoic Scotch features showed no surprise.

"Ay, sir," he said again, in a low voice, "’Tis what I’ve expected this lang time."

Trevelyan looked up from his packing, amused.

"You have—have you?"

"Is it the army, sir?" asked Mactier, doubtfully.

Trevelyan sat back on his heels.

"No," he said, briefly, not meeting Mactier’s eyes, "it’s the cholera."

The cap Mactier had been twirling dropped suddenly from his hand and he came a step forward. The long years in which Trevelyan had grown to be a man faded from Mactier’s consciousness; the big retired officer of the Queen’s service, was a boy again—the boy whom he had flung across his shoulder when he was wounded and brought home through the darkness of that long moorland night.

"Not the cholera, laddie! O, not the cholera!"

"That’s just what it’s going to be," said Trevelyan, wheeling around suddenly on his heel. "Where in thunder is that shirt?"

The old impetuous decision brought Mactier back to his surroundings at once. He was again the old retainer with the respectful manner and the stoic Scotch face. He stooped and picked from the floor the shirt that had fallen from the bed.

"Here it is, sir," he said.

"That’s it. Thanks." Trevelyan gave the shirt a shake and laid it in the Gladstone. "I’m just going to look around out there—you know I never could stay long in one place at a time, Mactier—and perhaps help the soldiers a little. I’ll be back before you know it!"

Mactier continued to hand him slowly one by one the articles on the bed, which Trevelyan put into the Gladstone. The old man was silent.

Trevelyan closed the Gladstone with a snap and looked up, a quizzical smile in his eyes.

"You’re not afraid I’m going to get the cholera and die—are you?"

Mactier looked down at him adoringly.

"Ay, sir, I fear just that."

Trevelyan laughed.

"Nonsense! Nothing has ever killed me yet." He rose and pushed the Gladstone to one side with his foot. "When I get back from Aberdeen, we’ll fix everything up for the year. If anything goes wrong or you want any advice, you can refer to Mr. Granger as usual. He’ll come up from Edinburgh if necessary."

"Veera gude, sir."

"I guess that’s about all for the present. You’d better tell James to have the trap around in plenty of time to get me to that afternoon train."

Trevelyan reached the Stewarts’ the next morning. They were not expecting him, and the little country station was deserted. He hired a carriage and a man, and was driven the seven miles that lay between him and the house. He looked out over the long stretch of familiar road with indifferent eyes, and the liveryman who had known him ever since the year his aunt had brought him to Aberdeen county, when his mother had died, wondered at his silence. Trevelyan’s heart throbs kept time to the revolving of the carriage wheels.

"We are taking you to her," they cried again and again—maddeningly. "You are to see her again," they cried, and his heart was in his throat as the carriage turned in at the big twisted iron gates.

He caught sight of her a long distance off, and before the noise of the approaching wheels had attracted attention. She was a little apart from the group that was gathered on the side piazza Malcolm Stewart had added years ago to the rambling old house. She was seated on a step, her big shade hat covered with wild flowers, lying at her feet, and adding a touch of color to the pale effect of her gray dress. Her hands were resting in her lap and she was looking off absent-mindedly toward the stretch of sunlit beach.

Mrs. Stewart was reading aloud, now and then putting out her hand to stroke John’s, that rested on the arm of the big garden chair drawn close to hers. He was looking steadily up at the white clouds sailing overhead and smiling to himself—not listening to the reading. Tom Cameron was teasing Maggie’s collie because he did not dare tease Maggie.

And all about the group the noonday sun of autumn lay as warm and bright as it might have done in summer.

It was Maggie who first heard the carriage and who caught sight of its approach around the curve in the long drive. She scrambled to her feet, and gathering up her skirts tore down the steps and drive to meet it, Tom Cameron at her heels and the collie bringing up the rear.

"It’s Rob," she shouted, breathlessly, and tripped suddenly and lay sprawling on the ground, the collie barking frantically and whirling around her in the dust of the gravel.

Trevelyan flung the reins to the liveryman and jumped down.

"Hello, Maggie," he cried, picking her up before Cameron could reach her. "Hello, Tom! There, don’t bark yourself mad, Bruce! Hello, everybody!"

They gathered around him, and his aunt kissed him affectionately.

"You’re a good boy," she said, the charm of a rare smile lighting up her eyes. "But why did you not wire you were coming so that we could have met you? Your boxes are coming later?"

"Thought I’d surprise you all. Here’s my box now." He motioned to the liveryman, who was lifting his Gladstone out of the trap.

"_That?_" said Maggie scornfully.

Trevelyan laughed, conscious the while that Cary was coming toward him.

"It’s good to see you again," she said simply, putting her hand in his and looking straight into his eyes, "But I said you wouldn’t come!"

"Did you?" he asked, forgetting the group around him as he looked at her. "Why?"

She smiled slowly.

"Oh, I hardly know. I suppose because I thought you wouldn’t leave home and your old crags and your big thunder storms. We’re so much quieter here."

Trevelyan turned sharply and beat his big hand softly against John’s shoulder.

"How are you, old man?" he asked, not raising his eyes from his own hand.

"Fine. I’m getting on my feet again. I drive myself now, and ride a little and walk."

"Good. Hello, Maggie—going on breaking Tom’s heart?" he pulled disrespectfully at one of Maggie’s stray curls, while Cameron fumed inwardly.

Maggie nodded cheerfully and beckoned Cameron to come and wipe the dust from her dress with his handkerchief.

They bore Trevelyan back with them to the piazza, and Mrs. Stewart sent for some lunch, which he ate out there in the midst of them. Stewart flung himself back in his big garden chair a little distance away and shaded his eyes with his hand, studying Trevelyan’s face. There was something in it he could not understand and it haunted him. He continued to watch it all the morning, and when Trevelyan was playing tennis with Cameron. And later his eyes would wander from Trevelyan to Cary, sitting over with his sister at the tea table. He noticed with a great pain at his heart that Cary was watching Trevelyan too, and that there rested over her face an expression that he, who had studied her every mood, had never seen before, and he wondered suddenly if he had been a fool—living in a fool’s paradise of late. Perhaps it was Trevelyan after all—perhaps—

Perhaps, too, the light that had sometimes crept shyly into her eyes during these last days—as shyly as a sunbeam creeps into gray wells of beauty—had not dawned for him. And all their walks upon the beach; and all their drives together; and all their watching of the rising moon had been nothing to her after all. And they had been _his_ life!

All night he lay awake, suffering dumbly, not knowing that Trevelyan in the adjoining room lay stretched across the bed, his face buried in the pillow, wondering passionately how he was to say "good-bye" to her to-morrow—without her knowing! Without her knowing!

*IX.*

At dawn Trevelyan got up and waited at the window for the sunrise. By and by he could hear the servants moving below stairs. The long minutes passed. From a turn in the drive he could see Martin returning with the mail that had come in late the night before. He watched him curiously as he paused to speak with McGuire, the gardener, and he wondered in an indifferent sort of way what he was saying that caused the latter to suddenly grow so excited. He rose and went down stairs, meeting Martin at the door.

"Anything the matter?"

Martin jerked off his cap awkwardly, and handed him the mail and the papers.

"It’s them Gordon ’Ighlanders, sir," he said. "If you’ll look at the paper—"

Trevelyan opened the sheet.

Martin watched him from a respectful distance. He saw Trevelyan crush the paper suddenly in his hand and turn sharply on his heel, and go into the library and close the door. "I thought that there would stir Master Robert up," he muttered. "Law! that was awful fine, an’ won’t Betty stare an’ hollow!"

An hour later the family assembled in the breakfast room.

"Where is Robert?" asked Mrs. Stewart, sitting down.

John shook his head.

"His room’s empty. Must be taking a walk. What has become of the morning paper?"

Trevelyan appeared suddenly in the doorway. He held the paper in his hand, and his face was as white as the sheet. His uncle rose hastily.

"Great heavens, boy! What’s the matter?"

"_Matter?_" Trevelyan’s voice rang out excitedly. "Read that!"

Half a dozen hands reached out for the paper. Trevelyan snatched it hungrily back.

"Let me read it to you! It’s the Gordon Highlanders." Trevelyan’s words stumbled over each other. "They’ve assaulted the Dargai Hill! The Gurkhas, Dorsets and Derbys couldn’t take it! Then General Kempster ordered the Gordon Highlanders and the Third Sikhs to reinforce the fighting line. The pipers played the ’Cock of the North,’ and then the mixed troops—the Highlanders and the Dorsets and Gurkhas and Derbys and Sikhs swept across! God! Look at the list of the dead!"

Trevelyan tossed the paper to John and turned away and leaned against the sideboard, his elbows on it, his head in his hands.

Young Stewart caught the paper and sat down at the table and spread it out in front of him with nervous fingers, and began to read, the rest gathering around him. The Highlanders of Aberdeen!

The breakfast stood untouched, growing colder every minute, but no one thought of it.

Young Stewart’s voice got husky now and then, and when he was half way through the sheet, he pushed it over to Cameron and rose.

"I guess you’d better finish it," he said.

It was hard to forget that if it had not been for that India transfer, he would have been with the Highlanders!

Trevelyan came forward suddenly, and leaned over Cary’s chair.

"Isn’t it splendid," he said. "That’s the way we Scotch fight—" he broke off abruptly, recoiling before the consciousness that he had not fought so.

"It’s grand," cried the American girl, her breath coming quickly.

The elder Stewart looked up for a moment from the paper he was reading over Cameron’s shoulder.

"You ought to have been there, Robert! That’s just your kind of work!"

"I wish to God I had!"

Mrs. Stewart crossed the room and went over to where John was sitting at the furthest end of the table, his chin in his hand. She sat down by him and leaned forward to speak to him.

"I know it’s hard," she said, "but think how I would have felt!"

Stewart drew outlines on the cloth with the breakfast knife he had picked up.

"We won’t talk of it," he answered, and he turned his face away.

His mother said nothing, and by and by she rose and went back to the group. Something in her face as she came up to them attracted Trevelyan and he stopped short in his excited talk and looked toward the solitary figure at the end of the table. His grasp suddenly relaxed on Cary’s chair and he went up to Stewart and sat down on the arm of his chair and gripped hard at his shoulder.

"I’m a brute," he said in a low voice, and he kept his grip on Stewart’s arm, and it was he who by and by led the others to calm down and eat their breakfast after some sort of a fashion.

He was to leave at midnight, and he had come especially to see Cary, but he scarcely saw her throughout the length of the long day. After that he devoted himself to Stewart, forcing him to think and speak of other things besides the great excitement of the hour. He laughed with him; he talked to him, and they went over their boyhood again. It was as it had once been between them, before they had grown to men. Once in the twilight Trevelyan spoke of Cary.

"Things are all going to pull straight between you," he said.

But Stewart, remembering the look on Cary’s face, when she had been watching Trevelyan the day before, shook his head.

It was not until Trevelyan went to dress for dinner that he realized that the real hardness of the task lay undone. He would leave at midnight, and only God knew when he would come to Aberdeen again—and God was silent. To-night would mean "good-bye."

After dinner he went up to Cary as she was sitting at the piano in the music room.

"Won’t you come for a walk on the beach?"

She looked up, flushed, and her hands fell back upon the keys discordantly.

"Why—I don’t know. Isn’t it too cold?"

"It isn’t cold," he said, picking up a white cashmere shawl and flinging it across her bare shoulders. "Come."

A tone in his voice caught and held her wavering and turned it to decision. She rose.

They passed Stewart in the hall, on his way to the music room, his flute in his hand.

"We’re going down to the shore for a little while," said Trevelyan, pausing before moving on.

Stewart nodded.

"Oh, all right. Don’t get cold, Cary."

And he went on to the deserted music room.

Trevelyan led her down the little path to the beach. He talked in a matter of fact way on indifferent subjects, as though to set her at her ease. He smiled grimly to the darkness.

"She’s afraid I’ll forget myself," he kept thinking.

They came from out of the strip of woods and its shadows to the beach, stretching away on either hand in the distance, and sloping ahead of them into the sea that kissed it and then receded, holding it at arm’s length before it embraced it again, as a lover does his sweetheart. The slow creeping up and retreating of the waters came faintly and soothingly to their ears. Far off a faint light appeared in the heavens, marking the rising moon. The burden of the day and the excitement of the battle crept off and were lost in the shadows.

"I haven’t seen the moon rise on the beach since I was a youngster," said Trevelyan.

"It’s beautiful," said Cary. "I always get near the moonlight when I can."

"Do you? Well, it pays one. It is beautiful. I don’t believe I ever quite appreciated the moon and the beach here when I was a little chap."

"Your aunt once told me how unhappy you were when they brought you here—to Aberdeen county."

"I fancy that’s pretty straight. I never took kindly to the level beach. I wanted my crags and my breakers and old Mactier. Mactier and the crags and the breakers were always associated together in my small mind."

He laughed.

"I suppose so; but it’s so peaceful here—" Cary broke off.

"Yes; but do you know I’ve a notion that some day or other, you’ll come often to the old place in Argyll and you’ll love it as I love it now."

Cary looked up at him quickly. Could it be that he still hoped that some day—

She shook her head.

"It’s beautiful," she said, "but it’s terrible! The beat of the sea on the crags always seems to be chanting something that I can’t understand. It’s a foolish idea, isn’t it?"

Trevelyan walked down to the water’s edge.

"It’s been chanting to me ever since I was born," he replied.

He looked out over the quiet waters.

"The sea here don’t talk to me," he went on. "It never did. It isn’t like my Scotland! Come, we’d better walk a little; you’ll get cold standing."

She gathered the cashmere that had slipped from her shoulders around her, and brought it up, covering her head. Her face white as the white moonlight looked out from its folds. Once a wave bolder than its fellows, crept up and wet her feet and the edge of the long skirt she was holding with one hand. She scarcely noticed it. Once she turned her face away from Trevelyan’s and looked out across the shining sea, to where it lay dark against the horizon. A great pity and a great awe, of something she could not define, lay heavy upon her and made her silent. It was as if this "good-bye" was to be the longest she had ever said. From the house, showing through the trees, came a stream of light. It was from the music room and it mingled with the white radiance that lay across the sea. And then through the quiet, there stole the first, faint notes of John’s flute. The music began softly and caressingly, and rose and filled the spaces all around them. It sobbed and moaned and called entreatingly to her, and then it sank into a marvelous crescendo; only to throb again against the silence—still entreating her to return, before it faded slowly and died away altogether.

The sobbing and the moaning of it pulsed in Trevelyan’s brain. This was good-bye. It was good-bye as he had never dreamed it. He could have fallen down before that white moon-touched face and cried the good-bye out, clinging to her feet. He could have cried it out, his head upon her breast; he could have cried it out, with her resting in his arms, but silence laid its seal on him instead.

Out in India, with Mackenzie, in the awful shadow of the plague, he would remember her so, with her white moon-touched face.

What had he done to hope for such a good-bye? Only a man who has won a woman could cry out his heart’s fullness so; and he had lost her! What right had he to tell her that he was going away, hoping so to wrest from her some word of approbation or of pity? Might she not say something that she would regret afterwards? He could go back home, and he could write her briefly. Then she would remember this night. Then, whatever he had said or left unsaid to-night or in the note, she would understand.

As for him—out in India with Mackenzie, in the awful shadow of the plague, he would remember her so, with her white moon-kissed face. He would hear again, louder than the moans of sufferings, the wondrous love music of Stewart’s flute and the song of the sea. It seemed to him he would hear it and see her so, if he were dying. And yet, he told himself, he would have given up his life right there before she should think that he had done this thing because of her approbation or her pity.

If he could only have been with the Highlanders at the assault! If—well, death would never come to him so. He had fought that out in the hospital and again the other night at home.

The music sobbed itself into silence.

"The old beach is a good deal prettier by night than I ever used to fancy it could be, as a little chap," he said after awhile. "I’ll remember it when I’m back in—Argyll."

"Why in the world are you in such a hurry to get back?" asked Cary.

"Oh, there are some things to be looked out for, and accounts to be gone over with Mactier. I couldn’t do without him."

"No, indeed. You’re going to stay there during the winter, I suppose. You’ll go back to London for the season?"

"I guess not this year," he said. "I’m not much on the society act."

"You’ll be lonely—won’t you?"

Trevelyan stopped and beat his foot against the sand and looked down at it.

"Oh, I’ve been a lonely kind of a chap all my life," he said in a matter of fact tone.

Cary caught her breath quickly, turning away that he might not see her face.

"It’s all my own doing," he went on. "I know it. I never was very sociable. I fancy I was born cross and horrid and crooked."

He laughed a little.

Cary turned to him and she put out her hand and for a moment it rested on his sleeve. He looked down at her upturned face, on which the moon was shining. A faint smile was folded around her mouth, hiding the pity beneath. She shook her head.

"Oh, no, you’re not!" she said. "You’re brave and you’re strong, and some day—"

He looked into her eyes.

"Yes—and ’some day’?"

"You’re going to do something fine!"

He shook his head in denial.

"I lost my chance," he said slowly.

"You will have another," she said, the hope of all the world in her voice. "We all have our second chance."

"Not like that—not like those Highlanders—" he broke off and his hands came up swiftly to either side of the lifted, moon-lit face. He could have crushed it, white and radiant as it was, between his hands; he could have kissed and kissed and kissed it!

And then his hands came up slowly, and he held her face as gently as the Captain would have done.

"I am going to take you back to the house," he said, looking down at her. "You are shivering. I might have known you would take cold."

She shrank back, trembling from the dumb anguish in his eyes, and covered her own with her hands.

Why couldn’t he have been with the Highlanders?

He drew one of her hands slowly down.

"Don’t," he said; "Don’t act so. Did I hurt you?"

She shook her head.

He raised the hand he held to his lips and he kissed it passionately, holding it close against his mouth for a moment, as though to seal the kiss there.

"I’m awfully glad you believe in me," he said, "I’m awfully glad for that ’some day’ you think of. Shall I tell you about a ’some day,’ too?"

She nodded in silence.

"Well, then, ’some day’ you’ll marry just like all the girls do, but you’ll marry some out of sight fellow—" he broke off, and retraced his steps to the house, adjusting his military walk to her slower one.

She pulled at the edge of her shawl. She was thinking if it had not been for Trevelyan, Stewart would have been at the Dargai Hill.

She bent her head as she entered the strip of wood, and the twigs felt out caressingly and touched her dress as she passed. The breath of the one red rose on her bosom came up to her like the voice of love, and over her white face there stole the faintest color of the rose, and she breathed quicker, remembering the music of the flute.

Stewart turned from the long window. He could see them emerging from the darkness of the wood into the moon-lit open. Trevelyan had spoken to him of Cary but what if Cary cared for Trevelyan after all! And he laid the silent flute away.

*X.*

At midnight Trevelyan stumbled blindly into the railway carriage, without a backward glance at Stewart, who had insisted on taking the long, dark drive to the station to see him off. Once in the darkness Trevelyan had put his hand heavily on Stewart’s knee, and leaned back and stared into the blackness ahead. All that Stewart had ever been to him—all that they had ever been to each other, swept across him.

Out there with the plague and Mackenzie, his eyes would ache for a sight of Stewart’s strong, kind face, but Stewart would not know. Out there, in the shadow of death, he would remember Stewart, and his heart would cry out passionately for him, but Stewart would not know. And he would think of Cary—how he would think of her—of her and Stewart. He would think of them together.

If he might only tell Stewart what this parting meant—that it was longer than he dreamed—and that he was not merely seeing him off to Argyll.

But what right had he to speak? Stewart could not change his decision now; nor his uncle, nor his aunt, nor his father, were he home, nor all London, nor—Cary. They would grieve when the letters came to them, but they would be spared the pain of parting. It was better so.

It was toward the evening of the next day when he reached home, and after he had finished his dinner he went into the big library, walked over to his desk and unlocked it.

"Now for it," he said briefly, and he sat down and began sorting papers, preparatory to going over them the next day with Mactier and his barrister, Mr. Granger, whom he had wired to come from Edinburgh and meet him at home the next morning.

He worked far into the night, and the next day it was the same. Literally he set his house in order. Granger returned to Edinburgh on the evening train, and Mactier received his instructions—in silence, shifting his old cap between his fingers, but not looking up to meet Trevelyan’s eyes.

Then Trevelyan had dinner. After the meal was over he tried to rest but he could not, and he went out into the hall and began to walk up and down—swiftly. There was no other sound in all the house but his rapid walking. Solitude enveloped him and the home of his people. Once he stopped and looked at the armor on the wall; once he opened the front door and stood on the steps staring into the night. The Pleiades were brighter and further off he remembered, thinking afterwards, than he had ever seen them; but the rest—the stretch of winding drive and lawn and trees lay wrapped in profound shadow and appeared unreal; only the Pleiades and the beating of the surf against the crags, seemed the things that existed.

The night air was cold and he went in and back to the library, and put another log upon the flickering blaze, and as the wood caught fire warmed his hands with the heat. After awhile he lighted his candle and went upstairs.

The next morning he said good-bye to the tenantry; in the afternoon he packed his grip and the few things needed for the coming journey. In the evening he wrote half a dozen letters—brief notes telling his father and his aunt and uncle of his intended return to India. They were all worded much the same. The old spirit of restlessness was on him. He wanted excitement. He was running out to India for a time to watch Mackenzie fight the cholera. They were not to worry. He expected to have a great time of it. His note to John was even briefer, but it was more serious in tone.

"DEAR OLD JOHNNY:—" it ran:

"Good-bye. I’m off for India again. You see I can’t keep away from it. I suppose it’s on the order of a man wanting to return to the scene of his murder.

"I’m a lucky dog, and of course I expect to return, but the plague isn’t always considerate of persons, and there’s the hundredth chance. I expect to come back and live at home myself. Still Granger has the will. If I don’t you’re to have the old place. You’ll come to it sometimes—hey; and have an eye on Mactier?

"I guess you were about right about my quitting the Service. I wasn’t fit.

"After all, if I hadn’t turned coward and lost my grip on myself, you’d have been with the Highlanders at the Dargai Hill, and Cary—

"Well, that don’t excuse me. I don’t mean it as an excuse. I’ve never been worth a shilling or made anything of my life, but I’ve thought a lot of you—always.

"Good-bye,

"ROB."

And then Trevelyan drew forth a clean sheet of paper and stared hard at it. What was there to say to Cary!

He dipped his pen in the ink.

"My Love," he wrote, and then stopped short, and stared at the words. Then he crumpled the sheet fiercely in his fingers and flung it into the fire.

"My dear Cary," he wrote, trying again, and then he laid down his pen and laughed harshly. The black letters stared back at him like small demons, grinning derisively.

The third time he started without a heading.

"I’ve written to the rest," it began, "and they will tell you of my plans. To you, however, I want to say something more. Now, that I am writing, there seems little to say to you, and yet, I’m human enough—if you will, coward enough still—to have you, at least, know that I have not been altogether candid with the others. I understand the danger. It is because of the danger that I am going. There’s no glory in it, and I don’t want any fuss, but there are our men in want—it’s something for the Service. You understand—don’t you?

"I was afraid of making you sad that night on the beach if I told you, and I selfishly, too, wanted you to myself, as you always were, and untouched by worry. I shall think of that walk with you, and the moonlight on your face, and the music—! After all, Johnny’s the only fellow fit for you. You don’t mind my saying so—do you?

"The sea was quiet that night—as quiet as you were, and my heart was the only tempestuous thing on the beach; and your face, oh, Cary,—your face!

"There’s no telling, of course, but I’ve a queer notion I’m not coming back—ever any more, as we used to say as children; but the sea will go on beating against the crags here—home on the Scottish coast, and perhaps by and by you’ll be able to understand the song?

"I love you, but I don’t love you as I did. It’s the Service, first, somehow. Am I building up the broken pieces, do you suppose? It’s a job—isn’t it?

"But my heart is breaking over this letter!

"There! I don’t want to make you sad. There’s nothing to be sad over. The tangle is just getting unsnarled; and you know there’s an end to every thread—

"There’s a big empty space on the wall of the gallery here. If you would _let_ Johnny hang your picture there! If you’d give him the right! And the sword—would you mind keeping my sword?

"It’s getting late. I make an early start to-morrow. I enclose Mackenzie’s letter. I got it less than a week ago.

"I shall never forget you. I think that is all.

"ROBERT TREVELYAN."

*XI.*

After Trevelyan left, the household in Aberdeen settled back again into its usual state of placidity.

The second day after his departure was threatening, and Cameron and Maggie killed time by pretending to play billiards. Malcolm Stewart had driven into the village in the morning to be gone all day; his wife was busy writing to Kenneth, her youngest son, who was tramping it through Normandy with a couple of old classmates. Cary was curled up in the window seat in the library, absently watching McGuire, the gardener, rake the path.

"Is the book so absorbing?"

Cary turned suddenly and met Stewart’s laughing eyes.

"Why, I didn’t know you were there!"

"So it seems. I’ve been sitting here for the last quarter of an hour watching you—read!"

Cary flushed.

"It’s a stupid old story, anyway," she complained, tossing the book to him. "What have you been doing?"

"Offered to help Tom and Maggie with billiards, but they were so deuced ungrateful I left."

"You were a wise man," said Cary, and she laughed. Then she began to drum on the window. "If you could do anything you liked what would you do, just at this minute?"

Stewart twirled the book he held indifferently. "I’d kiss you," he thought, but aloud he said meekly, "I’ll watch you, please ma’am."

"Nonsense!" answered Cary, turning her head uneasily and looking out of the window at McGuire again.

She stifled a yawn.

"It’s a lazy day, isn’t it?"

"You’re sure it’s the day?"

"Of course! What a suggestion. Is it near lunch time?"

Stewart nodded.

"How about a walk afterwards," he said. "It’s clearing and the sun’s coming out. We might go to the Point and watch it set," he added quickly, seeing her waver.

Cary clapped her hands.

"Truly? You really mean it; you’ll take me to the Point at last?"

"You’ll go then?"

"Of course I’ll go! I’ll get on a short skirt this minute. See me run!"

She jumped down from the window seat like a delighted child.

Stewart caught at her hand as she passed and detained her.

"I haven’t the right to ask," he said quickly, looking up into her face with his grave Scotch eyes, "but were you thinking of Robert when I spoke to you?"

"Yes," said Cary, not looking at him. "I’ve been thinking of him all day."

Stewart let her hand drop suddenly, but Cary made no movement to be gone.

"I—I can’t just tell you why," she said, pressing her hand tightly over the one Stewart had held, and keeping her eyes fixed on a bust of Burns, "but I feel—somehow, and I suppose it’s foolish—we—we won’t see him again for a long time."

Stewart leaned forward, looking up again at her.

"I haven’t the right," he said, "and you needn’t answer me, but—_is_ it Robert, Cary?"

A long shaft of breaking sunlight came through the window and touched her shoulders and her hair. The quiet of the room was absolute. She still pressed the hand he had held with the other.

"It isn’t Robert," she said, and her voice was lower than its wont, and she did not meet Stewart’s eyes, "I—" and then she ran swiftly from the room.

She would not meet his eyes all during lunch, and she insisted on devoting herself to Cameron, much to Maggie’s inward amusement.

"There’s something in the air," Maggie confided to Cameron after lunch; "I just feel it pricking—like pins. It’s something to do with John and Cary. Now what _do_ you suppose it is?"

She laughed, meeting Cameron’s eyes.

"What _do_ you suppose it is!" he repeated banteringly. "I’m _sure_ I don’t know!"

"Johnny’s taking her to the Point this afternoon!"

Cameron sighed heavily.

"Well, that means ’good-bye’ to Johnny!"

Maggie wheeled around suddenly on him.

"What a way to talk!"

Cameron pulled her to him gently by the shoulders, until he could look down into her face.

"Perhaps—that is—will you go with me to the Point to-morrow, Maggie?" he asked.

"Is it not too late in the year to try the Point?" asked John’s mother anxiously, as he and Cary started out. "The days are shorter now, and then there is the tide, and the danger of a mist, you know!"

Stewart studied the skies critically.

"It seems straight enough, but, of course, if you’re going to worry, Little Madre—"

"Oh, of course not. I’m just foolish. Go along with you both," and she pushed them gently away from her with a laugh.

"We won’t stay long on the Point," Stewart said when they were well on their way. "It would be a nasty thing to be caught in a mist out there."

Cary pushed a small stone along with the toe of her walking boot, and was silent. Indeed she scarcely spoke all during the walk to the Point.

If he _had_ been at the Dargai Hill, she kept thinking, if—he—had!

She followed Stewart out to the extreme end of the peninsula, and she stood quietly listening as he pointed out to her, how in high tide the waters met across the narrow neck and isolated it from the mainland. Sometimes, he told her, the waters swept across the island so left, and he showed her where they had come up and left their mark upon the trunks of the trees.

And then the spell of her silence fell upon him and they stood quiet and motionless, looking out to sea.

They waited so, for the sun to sink slowly behind the distant line of the horizon, and they watched the big white clouds change and clothe themselves in the pink and purple of the coming sunset, like air nymphs getting ready for a ball. The quietness of the day’s death was on them. Once or twice they spoke.

"It reminds me of the Point, at home," said Cary once.

He smiled.

"I knew it would," he answered.

She sat down on a big rock at the end of the Point and looked up at the changing clouds. He walked a little way down to the water’s edge and then he came back slowly.

The vision of the Highlanders and the Dargai heights, that had haunted him since Trevelyan had gone, faded. There seemed to be nothing in the world that mattered except her sitting there on the big gray stone, with the water lapping at her feet, and the glow of the sunset on her face.

He watched her as she looked toward the sinking sun, and after it had disappeared he stole up behind her and stooped over her, calling her by name, softly, as though afraid the sea and pines would hear.

She looked up, and then her eyes went back quickly to the afterglow.

The incoming tide lapped softly against the rocks on the shore, and drew nearer. The pink and purple of the clouds changed to a delicate gray, that deepened as the moments passed; and from the sea there stole landward a thin white vapor, as exquisite as a bride’s veil, but growing thicker and thicker as it came nearer.

Stewart, following the direction of her eyes, straightened himself suddenly with the alertness that comes with the consciousness of danger.

"It’s the mist," he said, briefly. "Come."

He took her hand and held it, and when she would have drawn it away, he tightened his hold.

"You need my help," he said sharply. "We’ve got to get out of this just as quick as we can!"

The white vapor, grown thicker, crept up behind them, and Stewart changed their rapid pace into a run, but the mist caught up with them, and by and by surrounded them and hid the sea behind them and on either side, and the narrow neck in front. He urged her on over the two miles that lay between them and the mainland.

After awhile he felt her hold on his arm relax.

"I—can’t—go—so fast," she panted. "I—I—" and her voice trailed off and was lost in the heaviness of the mist.

He stopped and began to talk rapidly, and he rubbed her cold hands as he spoke.

"You must," he said sternly. "We can’t stop here. Don’t you know the sea may cover the peninsula, and that the tide is coming in, and is cutting off the neck?"

She nodded.

"I’ll try again, oh, I will try!"

She staggered on—blindly, clinging to him. He could feel the cold, tense pressure of her fingers, and it thrilled him. She could feel the strong touch of his hand, and it reassured her. Neither could see the face of the other.

And still the tide crept in on either side of the narrow peninsula. It was the only thing he was conscious of—except her presence and her danger.

If he could lead her from out of this mist! If he could save her! If he could reach the neck in time! His heart burnt within him, and cried out in passionate protest that he seemed so powerless—he who loved her so!

He drew her hand closer and he bent over her for a moment, his face near to her own. They could see each other’s faces so,—faintly.

"Dear," he whispered, and his heart was in his voice.

She clung to his hands, trembling.

If he would only tell her that he loved her, the waters might sweep over the narrow neck before they two reached it! But he did not speak again.

The land tapered off, leading to the neck, and he felt the ground grow moist beneath his feet. He went forward, keeping her at arm’s length, but afraid to let go her hand, lest he should lose her in the mist. He put down his foot and he could feel the water creeping up around his boot and filling it.

"The tide is covering the neck," he said briefly, stooping down and unfastening his boots, after which he stood upright, breathing deeply, to gather all his strength. Then he came closer to her and stooped and raised her in his arms and rose again, pressing forward.

She pressed her hands on his shoulders, and struggling, tried to push herself free.

"Are you afraid of me?" he asked.

"Afraid of you!" and she laughed, but the laugh was swallowed up in the mist.

"Then you must let me carry you across."

"What do you think I am?" she asked fiercely. "Let you carry me with that wound in your back! I am as strong as you!"

She struggled again to free herself.

"Oh, no, you’re not," he cried gladly, "and you’ll be safer so!"

"What do I care for safety when your life is in danger? We’ll face it together. Let me down and you—you—I’ll let you lead me through—" her voice broke in a sob.

The silence of the years was broken by her sob. He let her slip down, holding her closely still, and then he drew her face to his, and kissed her.

"I love you," he whispered, "I love you," and he laid his cheek against her own, cold with the damp of the mist, and then he drew her nearer to the waters. "Come on, dear," he said brokenly.

They could feel the tide creeping around their feet, and it came up almost to the woman’s knees. Still she clung, struggling, panting, to his hand, as he led her into the deeper waters. Once she brought his hand that was leading her up to her face, and he felt her lips upon it.

"I love you," she said clearly, and the words pierced the mist, reaching him.

"Come on, dear," he said again, and still brokenly, leading her to where the tide ran swiftest.

The waters were up to her waist, and she was chilled and benumbed, and her clothes dragged on her, and she was weary with the weariness of death, but she did not know it. She still clung to his hand. And then as the waters grew deeper:

"Will it hurt?" she asked, and when he did not answer her, "There! I am not afraid."

Her voice was stronger than he had ever heard it, and sweeter; but the strength and the sweetness of it, were like crushing weights upon his heart and brain. She could speak so—when the waters were growing deeper! Moisture not of the mist or the sea sprang to his face and bathed it. And then the agony her words had caused—lifted. She did love him then; loved him with a deathless courage. Let the waters cover them, and the mist draw the folds of its mantle over the level sea!

Suddenly he stopped and lifted his head, breathing quickly.

"The ground’s higher," he cried. "We’ve reached it—the mainland!"

She did not call back to him, but she placed her free hand over his that held hers, and he could feel the added pressure of thanksgiving.

Little by little they could feel the waters receding. Now they were down to his knees again; now they were at his feet—conquered.

He drew her into his arms and he called her by name. She did not answer.

"Aren’t you going to speak to me?" he asked, bending over her.

She stroked the shoulder of his coat slowly with her cold, wet hand.

"I—I—what must I say?"

"What I have been waiting all these years to hear—what you said a little while ago—that you love me," he answered, looking into her face.

She bent her head and laid her cheek against her hand on his shoulder.

"I do," she said. "I love you—" her voice broke.

He waited.

"I love you," she repeated, clinging to him. "I have loved you for months. I have been foolish for you! I have been frightened to have you out of my sight; to have you do anything when I was not along for fear you would get hurt in some way! I’ve imagined all kinds of things that could happen to you—I am so foolish—I love—"

The words came up to him, choked, and he had to lean closer over her to hear.

She faltered, lifting her face from her hands.

"_Yes?_"

"I dreamed last night you were at the Dargai Hill—that you were killed, and I awoke sobbing in the darkness. I am—so foolish. I knew it wasn’t true—" she turned her face away and wiped her eyes.

"And you love me—like that?" he asked slowly.

Behind them the tide crept in, covering portions of the peninsula and all of the narrow neck. Around them the mist lay heavy.

"But you were not frightened a little while ago and you were in danger then."

She shook her head.

"No; I was with you—we were together," she answered him simply.

He stroked her damp hair, unconscious alike of the tide and the mist, drinking in her words thirstily.

"Then it isn’t Robert!" he said more to himself than to her.

"No," she said again. "I think it has been you always—and I didn’t know it. I think I have been waiting for you always. Robert showed me that it was you!"

He was silent, waiting for her to go on.

"If it hadn’t been for your danger when you were ill from the wound, I mightn’t have ever known. And if you’d been at the Dargai Hill—" she stopped and stretched out her arms, and put them around his neck, and looked into his eyes. "Oh! I couldn’t have borne that! I’m selfish, but I couldn’t have spared you even for the Service!"

The vision of the desolate years he had planned and thought of—the years devoid of service—and the memory of the useless uniforms, hidden away, and the sabres, useless too, crossed on the wall at home, faded, and he laid the dead memories at her feet.

"This compensates—" he broke off, kissing her in silence.

After awhile he drew her arm through his and started to walk slowly.

"You must get home and get on dry clothes," he said.

And he helped her up the steep embankment and into the road that led home.

The tide reached its flood and turned. The sea’s low song came to them muffled by distance, and was lost in the darkness behind them. The heavy mist lifted slowly, and through the rifts, one by one, the stars appeared, peeping down at them like little children peeping from the coverings of their cribs; and by and by the moon stole from behind a cloud and moved slowly between the twinkling stars, as a nurse steals from behind a shadowy curtain and moves softly from bed to bed, to see if the children sleep.

He led her in silence through the great wrought-iron gates and up the drive, toward the lighted house, looking down into her uplifted face with his grave eyes.

And he kept looking at her all during dinner. Once she looked across at him—and smiled.

Later she complained of being tired, and she rose to go to bed. Stewart lighted her candle and waited for her at the foot of the stairs, after the fine old custom of his people. Not even Malcolm Stewart, as the elder host, ever thought of lighting Cary’s candle.

Stewart handed it to her as she came up to the great stairway and stopped. To-night he did not offer to shake hands.

She took the candle and then slipped by him quickly. He called her back.

"Aren’t you going to say ’good-night’ to me?" he asked, a smile creeping around his mouth.

"Why—yes. Good-night."

He leaned over her and kissed her.

"Good-night," he said, and his voice was suddenly grave. "I hope your dreams will be sweet."

She sighed—a sigh of happiness, and she looked down at the burning taper in her hand.

"Then they will have to be of you."

She did not speak for a moment; afterwards she lifted her eyes from the burning taper and looked into his.

"I love you," she said again, and she repeated the words over and over as a master plays over and over a bar of sweetest music, and she put out her hand and pressed her fingers against his cheek. They rested there—closely—for a minute. "I love you so!"

Then she gathered up her long silk skirts and began slowly to mount the stairs, the taper lifted carefully before her. She did not look back, but he could see her face, even in the shadow of the grim armor, by its light. And on her white face there rested a perfect peace. Once a draught caught the flickering taper and nearly extinguished it. She stopped and, dropping her long skirts that fell back upon the oaken stairs with a silken rustle, she shielded the taper with her hand. So would she shield the light of her pure life and her wifehood from the world’s breath, he thought.

He stood leaning against the bannister, watching her until she vanished, and he stood there after the soft silken rustle of her skirts and her faint footfall were lost, staring at the last turn in the stairs.

And in western Scotland, Trevelyan sat, his head bowed upon the letter he had just finished to Cary.

*XII.*

It was spring before Trevelyan could push forward into the lowland section, and on to the interior and Mackenzie. The reports of a threatened cholera scare had reached down as far as Patna. There were Britons coming every day from farther inland to Patna, grateful enough for the privilege of having passed the government line of precaution, and being allowed to stay there; but a British subject, who was neither ordered there by command of the War or Colonial Offices, was another matter, and Trevelyan was regarded with a blank curiosity by those who knew his proposed destination.

There were a good many technicalities and difficulties to be surmounted, too, in the question of getting inward as far as the precaution lines, that would have discouraged anyone less determined than Trevelyan. It had seemed simple enough—to get there—after the journey had once been begun, but the actual reaching Mackenzie was another matter.

The delay, under which he fretted inexpressibly, only brought more serious accounts of the spread of the disease. A score of natives had sickened and died—traced directly to the foulness of the water used—and later there were contradictory reports as to the appearance of the scourge within the barracks. The waiting days became a torture to Trevelyan, and it was not until he had scaled the wall of obstacles, and was well on the other side, pressing onward to Mackenzie, that the torture lifted. The fear—half formed and never acknowledged—of possibly not getting to Mackenzie, fell from him as mile after mile took him further from Patna and nearer to the garrison, and once or twice he laughed a little as he kept picturing to himself Mackenzie’s surprise at this personal answering of his letter.

There were other pictures that would force themselves on him at this time, but he fought them from him with a strength grown with much usage. There were pictures of Cary’s face—white with the whiteness of the moon upon it and sweeter than the fairest flower—there were pictures of home and old Mactier, mourning for him, and visions of the sea beating against the high, gray crags. It seemed to him he could hear and see it even then, inland as he was, until he would force himself back to present things and the desolate waste land through which he was journeying; the stricken section to which he was going; the cholera and Mackenzie. And he would hold his wandering thoughts sternly in check, as years ago he had held in check the stallion he had conquered and was wont to ride. And so the day would pass in a desperate struggle against self, or his desire to press onward to Mackenzie.

It had needed all his powers of eloquence; all his strategy; all the hard discipline of repression taught by the Woolwich years, to get him so far on his journey, and he had thought with a certain grim satisfaction that all the Woolwich years were paying back their debt to him, at last.

It was early in the morning when he reached the small inland Station. His presence caused a good deal of comment among the troopers he passed on his way to Mackenzie and the improvised hospital that had been erected a long distance from the barracks. The whole thing was strange; the new faces that he met; the awful sense of a growing horror that brooded like a bird of prey over the Station with its handful of men—placed out here by order of government officials far away and safe enough in London—struggling against the threatened devastation to the ranks.

He found Mackenzie in the small ill-constructed apothecary shop and he stood still a minute, studying his friend’s haggard face and heavy eyes, before the surgeon was aware of his presence. Mackenzie was weighing morphia, and three times Trevelyan saw his hand shake and spill the white powder before he was able to divide it in correct proportions.

"Mackenzie," he said evenly, not wishing to startle him.

The surgeon turned sharply and looked at him. Then he leaned against the table, his back to it, his hands gripping its edge. He leaned forward a little, frowning. He had had a hard night of it, but—

"Mackenzie—it’s I—Trevelyan. Don’t you remember me?"

Trevelyan went forward.

Mackenzie’s long, lean fingers suddenly relaxed their grip on the edge, and he sat back against the table.

"Good heavens!" he said, slowly.

Trevelyan went up and slapped him on the shoulder.

"I got your letter and it just stirred up my fighting blood. I packed my grip—and, presto! here I am."

Mackenzie was silent.

"Come; haven’t you anything to say to a chap who has been traveling thousands of miles to get here? Aren’t you glad to see me?"

"_Glad to see you?_" Mackenzie lifted his haggard eyes from the floor to Trevelyan’s face, "_Glad to see you_—in this pest house? You’re the maddest fool God ever made!"

Trevelyan drew down the corners of his mouth.

"Perhaps I am," he said, "but I’ve come; and I’ve come to stay."

Mackenzie laid a heavy hand on his shoulder and Trevelyan could feel the pressure of the long thin fingers through his coat.

"You are not going to stay one hour," he said, in a low voice, "not—one—hour; do you hear? There’re new cases breaking out every day; it’s going to play the devil! If you’re thinking of suicide, go back to London and blow your brains out, or throw yourself into the Thames—that’s more romantic, still. There’s nothing romantic about dying of cholera. It isn’t a pretty way to die!" Mackenzie laughed, harshly.

Trevelyan put his hand up to his shoulder and forced away Mackenzie’s grip.

"I’m not hunting suicide or death either," he said briefly, "and I’m not mad. I know perfectly why I’m here—and what I’m here for, and I’m going to stay." He paused a moment and then went on hurriedly, forcing back the tension in his voice. "Do you think I’ve been traveling and squandering money for weeks, and ’pulling strings’ to get here, and being delayed at Patna, to be turned back now like a whipped boy turned out of school?"

"But you don’t know what it’s like—"

"I guess I’ll find out quick enough. Look at you—ready to drop, and then refusing help!"

Mackenzie put his hand up wearily to his forehead and pressed it there tightly. The lines cut by lack of sleep on his haggard face relaxed a little.

"It’s nothing. I’ll be all right when I’ve gotten some sleep. You’re not needed. There’s Clarke, and the orderlies—" he broke off.

"Yes?"

Mackenzie bit his cheek and brought down his hand heavily on the table.

"I don’t need you. Will you go?"

"No."

Mackenzie turned and went back to the morphia scales. Something in the work he was doing and the way he was doing it struck Trevelyan.

"Where’s the apothecary?" he asked briefly.

Mackenzie balanced the scales carefully.

"Sick," he said.

"Where’s Clarke?"

Mackenzie added a fraction of morphia to the scales.

"Sick," he said.

"And the helpers—the orderlies?"

Mackenzie put down the scales, suddenly, and stared at them.

"Half sick," he said.

*XIII.*

The long days crept slowly by at the Station and through the infected district. as horses driven by Death, mercilessly, tired by their task, and yet urged on continually to break through the breastwork of care and precaution raised by Mackenzie and Trevelyan, so that the course of their charioteer might sweep onward to the outlying districts and turn the scourge, local as yet, into a devastating epidemic.

"Anything to keep the barracks clear of it," Trevelyan had thought and said, and Mackenzie, grown silent with the effort of the fight, nodded without speaking, forcing away from him the remembrance of the epidemic he himself had been through, and the stories once told him by his father, who had helped beat back the scourge on the Ganges in ’63.

Each hour was freighted with unspeakable horrors, and Trevelyan learned to know the course of the disease almost as well as Mackenzie himself. He knew the first symptoms; he knew with an instinct that rarely failed, just the cases that were liable to pull through, and those that were liable not to; he could foretell the signs of the _collapse_, when the face would become cold and gray, the finger tips and lips and nose livid; the eyes deeply sunk and bloodshot with the dark rings beneath; the breath without any sensible warmth when caught on the hand; the scarcely audible beating of the heart;—the apathy that was itself a death.

The haunting shadow of his crime was driven back and back by the absorbing matter of the hour, and even Cary’s face—moon-kissed—seemed indistinct and far away, as he went about his tasks. It seemed developed on a plate, hidden in the dark room—the innermost recesses of his soul—to be produced and worshipped now and then when courage weakened and the heart languished and grew sick.

He would recall it, at night sometimes, when he had flung himself down for a few hours of rest, and he would press his fingers over his eyes as though to hide from sight the memories of the day’s horrors and the day’s deaths, and the face would come to him then, and his soul would look upon it as on some dream of heaven.

And then the memory of her face would fade, and he would let it slip away from him, as though knowing it had no place here—midst the cholera scourge, and he would fall off to sleep and sleep exhaustedly.

The days held but one purpose, but one thought—his service to the men, and he sometimes wondered how even the service of the hour had a power to hold him, stronger than the memory of her face.

In those days, when each morning saw another man added to the inmates of the hospital, it was all reality—grim, terrible and as strong as the death he fought; and he and Death kept on the fight, and even when Death won, his triumph seemed petty and incomplete because of this man’s courage, which he could neither break nor bend.

It was when Death had seemingly withdrawn his presence a little way that Mackenzie, one morning motioned to Trevelyan to come outside to the entrance of the hospital. He spoke to the point—a necessity taught him long ago when he had first joined the army and helped fight the Asiatic scourge for the men.

"Five cases have broken out ten miles in-country. You know what that means—a general mowing down and spread of the disease unless it is strangled right away! I can’t leave the men here, or go any distance from the barracks for fear—"

Trevelyan looked at him squarely and nodded.

"Of course not, and you want me to go?"

"Clarke isn’t fit yet, and I couldn’t let him go anyway. Could you go?"

"Sure."

"And take charge of things? I’ll send you some helpers, and perhaps run over for an afternoon later to see how you’re getting on."

"All right. When am I to start?"

"Could you go to-day—now?"

Trevelyan brought his hand up to his forehead suddenly in the old salute, a shadow of a smile in his eyes.

"Yes, sir."

Mackenzie looked away and stood silent a moment.

"It hardly seems as though I could spare you," and then quickly, "You understand about the calomel and how to use it?"

"Yes."

"And Trevelyan—"

Trevelyan stopped suddenly as he was walking away, and turned.

"Well?"

"And just when the morphia’s needed, and when it’s judicious to give the opium, calomel and white sugar—and about the salt injections in the veins?"

"Yes."

"And Trevelyan—"

Trevelyan wheeled around, stopping short again. Mackenzie was still looking away.

"Well?"

"And, for God’s sake, be careful!"

*XIV.*

It was one thing to help fight the scourge with Mackenzie in the military hospital, crude as it was, where things were carried on with a certain nicety and regard to military discipline that was stronger than even the demoralizing dread of the hour; but it was another matter to fight it, and crush it, and stamp it out, alone, in the midst of half a hundred panic stricken natives, who knew neither military discipline nor paid proper attention to the precautionary measures of the disease.

Trevelyan had never possessed the quality of conciliation; it had been either one side of the line or the other. He had always reduced things to their smallest denomination at once, with no intermediate measures. And the quality became now a practical and living thing, as he forced the natives to bow before him in obedience, and brought order out of chaos.

It was not altogether the exact application of the military organization learned at Woolwich, or the inspiration of the rally he had dreamed of, that would fire his men, he told himself grimly, as he worked among these people, but it answered for it, and it brought them into subjection to his will.

He held them in control, as the pilot holds in control the ship he steers, guiding it through the madness of the gale, and they never dreamed of mutiny, because they feared him more than they feared the cholera.

And by and by when they saw that he held the scourge in check, his hand upon its throat, they fell down before him in all the pitifulness of ignorance and superstition, as before a being mightier than they had ever conceived of, worshiping him. But they were at his feet always.

Mackenzie, shrewd and silent-tongued, took in the situation at a glance, when he rode over for an afternoon, a fortnight later, to see how Trevelyan was getting on.

"He’s the biggest man I ever knew," he said to himself as he followed the orderly who was leading him to Trevelyan.

He found Trevelyan stooping over the small rigid figure of a native baby, his hand still resting on the tiny wrist where the pulse had just stopped its slow beating.

Mackenzie came in and stood on the other side of the child, and Trevelyan raised his head. He showed no surprise at Mackenzie being there. In his face was all the unutterableness of the horror; in his voice was all the passionate protest, all the crushing dread, all the grief, that he had never shown before.

"_It—is—awful!_"

Mackenzie nodded.

"Yes," he said.

*XV.*

Three weeks later, when it seemed as though the battle had been won, Trevelyan got a hasty scrawl from Mackenzie.

It had been carried by a man of the regiment, who had ridden the ten miles on a dead run, and now stood exhausted before Trevelyan, his face twitching with the fright born of the tidings he had brought.

Trevelyan took the note in silence and he looked hard at the man’s face before he opened the message. Then he bent his head and forced the paper open, still without comment.

"Eight cases broken out in barracks. If you can leave—come. Mackenzie."

He crushed the note in his hand.

"My respects to Dr. Mackenzie," he said quietly, raising his head and meeting the eyes of the trooper, "and I will be with him to-night."

He spent the morning in arranging matters and leaving orders with his chief helper, who was to remain for a time, more as a precautionary measure than for anything else, and then made his own scant preparations in haste to get to Mackenzie before nightfall.

He had thought first of slipping away, fearful of what the knowledge of his going might bring, but the more he thought of it the more he put the idea from him. After all the truth was the wisest.

He called all those of the half hundred natives together who had been spared of the scourge—most of whom he had fought death for, and he addressed them in Hindostanee. He spoke to them simply and briefly; he told them what they must do—not why they must do it, but simply because he ordered them to, and expected their obedience—relying on the worshipful fear with which they regarded him.

"If I hear of your disobeying me—and I shall hear it, for my ears are long and sharp—I shall come back and I will kill the dog who dared to disobey my commands, and you are to obey and do just what the _Sahib_ I leave here tells you to do—do you understand?"

A low murmuring of assent greeted him, and one or two of the women held their babies up that they might look upon the great _Sahib_ who was leaving them for a time; who was wise enough to know ten miles off if anyone disobeyed him; who was strong enough to kill the dog who tried to disobey his great commands.

And the murmuring of their voices followed him as he rode away from them later, and the echo of their "_Sahib! Sahib! Sahib!_" haunted him, not knowing that in the years that lay ahead, the native mothers would tell their babies of the greatness of the Sahib who once had come to them.

The shadows, the children of the sunset, lay thick upon the road, over which he journeyed back to Mackenzie, and in the silence he began to think of England and of Scotland, and of Cary.

He thought of them all then, in the pause that came between the struggle he had just passed through and the struggle that lay ahead, as he had not had the time or peace to think of them since he had left Patna. Nor did he try to force the thoughts from him as he had done on leaving Patna, but he went in search of them as a father goes in search of little truant children hiding in the dark, and brings them back and holds them close with caresses.

He brought the vision of Mactier forth so, and he went over every familiar gesture, every tone of Mactier’s voice he knew; he called up the mother-face of his aunt, the soft pressure of her hand; and he thought of his uncle and Maggie and Kenneth, and of Stewart—lingeringly—and of his father.

And then he brought forth the picture plate, buried in the dark room of his soul, and he thought of her; and he thought, and thought of her! He held the dream picture up between him and the light of the dying day, and once he put out his hand slowly and it rested lightly in the air, but in his dream it rested on Cary’s head. Once he raised his head suddenly and sharply, and he breathed quicker than his wont. The night shadows crept up and peered into his thin, lined face with the dark-circled eyes; and though he was alone with only the air touching him, in his dream his face was close to hers.

And back of the dreams was the echo of the ocean on the crags. But the dreams and the echo faded as he came within sight of the military hospital, and the thoughts receded back and back into the darkness before the new necessity of the hour; but the truant children were not lost, only hiding from him, and peering at him from the shadows and waiting for him to come and look for them and take them home.

He dismounted, hardly conscious of the greetings the men gave him as they crowded around him, and he went at once to Mackenzie, as an officer reporting for duty.

Mackenzie looked at him sharply as he entered. The full beard he had grown had changed him, and would have hidden the loss of flesh and the haggard lines to any other than Mackenzie.

"You don’t look fit to go on with the job, boy," he said concisely.

Trevelyan laughed.

"That’s absurd, don’t you know? I’m all right."

"It’s more than you look—you’re all pulled down!"

"You’re dreaming! Tell me about the barracks!"

And Mackenzie told him—briefly.

All night he and Mackenzie and Clarke worked over the new cases, resting by turns, and in the morning two other men were brought in. One was the trooper who had borne the summons to Trevelyan.

The cases developed slowly, and with an effort that had in it something of the supernatural, they kept it from spreading into the mow down of an epidemic. But the men were sick—sicker than any had yet been, and out of the proportion stricken, the mortality was frightful, and Death’s twin brother, Fear, laid his heavy hand upon the district.

The men were good, on the whole, as to precautionary measures, for they held Mackenzie and even Clarke in wholesome awe, but they regarded Trevelyan with something greater still. They were ashamed before him—ashamed to mention their fear, or even think it, as he came and went among them, silent, commanding, and unmoved by fear.

Mackenzie or Clarke could not have spoken so to them—silently. They were at their own business. They were supposed and expected to meet disease and death, daily, hourly if necessary, and not be afraid. But Trevelyan was not a surgeon; he had come out to them to serve them in their extremity—voluntarily—without military command, and they grew to think of the scourge after a while as they would have looked upon a hostile tribe to be conquered—as an enemy to be vanquished for the Queen.

And as though the lessening of their panic was the sign for the dying out of the scourge, the cholera cases decreased as the days wore themselves away.

It was toward the end of the desperate fight that they had made that Mackenzie came in one day at dawn, to relieve Trevelyan’s watch over the half dozen cases in his wing of the hospital. He noticed that Trevelyan looked oddly white, and that there was a drawn expression about his mouth and face.

"What is it," he asked. "Aren’t you feeling well?"

"Why, yes; what made you ask?"

"You look——"

"It’s the daylight and the sickly candle," Trevelyan answered shortly as he rose to leave. "McHennessy, here, has put in a night of it. See you later."

Once outside in the narrow passage Trevelyan leaned up stupidly against the wall. His head was hurting him violently and was colder than the hand he pressed against it, and a sudden deadly nausea seized him. He stared hard at the wall opposite and made a movement as though to call Mackenzie. Then he drew back and waited. A numbness crept into his legs, and it seemed to him to deaden all his power. After awhile the seizure passed and he stumbled over to the apothecary’s room, and he began to measure out the old prescription of the morphia and calomel and white sugar. What was the good of calling Mackenzie when Mackenzie could do nothing more for him than he could do for himself? Then he went into an empty room kept for emergency cases at the end of the building, and flung himself down.

After awhile the deadly nausea returned and he sat up and crawled to his feet, and went back to the apothecary’s room and measured out the prescription again—three hours was the limit between doses, and his watch said that the three hours had passed. He believed the watch had lied, and that it was thirty hours instead.

Mackenzie opened the door and stood transfixed on the threshold. Trevelyan conscious of the movement turned and started violently.

"What are you doing?" Mackenzie’s voice was terrible in its hardness.

Trevelyan held up the scales with a trembling hand, and he made an odd sound in his throat that was intended for a laugh.

"Measuring morphia! What do you suppose?"

Mackenzie came up close to him, and his horror-stricken eyes looked straight into Trevelyan’s sunken ones.

"Who for?"

Trevelyan was silent.

"Answer me!"

Trevelyan shook his head piteously, and a ghastly pallor crept slowly up over his face and into the hollows of his temples and his cheeks.

"You’re ill, and you didn’t call me!"

"What was the good——"

Trevelyan swayed forward. When he spoke again there was an apology in his hoarse voice because he was ill.

"It’s the nausea," he said simply.

*XVI.*

Mackenzie went in search of Clarke.

"Drop everything and come with me," he said. "It’s Trevelyan—Trevelyan’s got the cholera."

Clarke took a long breath. Then he called to two passing orderlies.

Mackenzie led the three of them back to the apothecary’s shop, as a soldier would have led a squad of men forward to meet an enemy, his face hard with the control he had put upon it, but it changed suddenly as they reached Trevelyan and picked him up and bore him down the hall. He allowed them to do so unresistingly, falling back into their arms a dead weight. They staggered under it. He made no comment until they reached the door of the surgeons’ room. Then he shook his head.

"Not there," he said. "Take me in with the men."

"But you’ll be ever so much more comfortable here," said Clarke, still breathing quickly under the weight of his portion of the burden.

"You’d better let us take you in here, lad," said Mackenzie, bending over him. "You’ll get well twice as quick and it’s quieter, and the nausea will pass——"

"It’s the cholera," said Trevelyan, in a clear calm voice. "Take me in with the men."

*XVII.*

All day Mackenzie sat by Trevelyan, scarcely leaving him, except to make his rounds; Clarke and the orderlies taking charge of the two small wards and the needs of those there. And all day Mackenzie sat stoically looking off into space or turning to feel Trevelyan’s pulse or watch the change of his face. There was not a shadow of a change he did not watch and note. Trevelyan’s great form lay motionless—deadened by morphia, the occasional twitching of the limbs and the heavy breathing, the only signs of life. Now and then, as the effect of the morphia lifted, he would turn his head restlessly and murmur incoherent things, or call for water, and Mackenzie would force a teaspoonful at a time of the cool liquid between the rigid lips.

Once Trevelyan’s hand went up with a spasmodic motion to his throat, and the movement pulled and tore aside the covering across his chest, and exposed to view the white scar on his shoulder. Mackenzie leaning over him to replace the covering, was attracted by the sight of the old wound, and he hesitated and leaned a little nearer, examining it.

A sudden death-like quiet brooded over the ward, and the minutes lengthened and still Mackenzie leaned over the unconscious figure, his eyes fixed on the scar. By and by he looked at Trevelyan’s gray and sunken and unconscious face, and a swift change passed over his own impenetrable features, and he drew the covering quickly over the scar, as though he were ashamed.

Clarke came in and Mackenzie straightened himself and turned to meet him, his hand upon the covering that hid the scar. There was something defiant in the attitude.

Clarke came up and stood on the other side of the bed.

"What do you think of it?" he asked.

"I don’t want to think anything about it," Mackenzie answered shortly.

"But his chances?" asked Clarke after a little. "Has he got any show?"

"He’s got a damned bad case," said Mackenzie, "and no strength to fight it with. I knew it would be just this way if he ever got it—he’d have it _bad_! There’s nothing half way about him!"

Clarke tapped his foot against the floor and looked down at it..

"How he could have loved some woman," he said.

Mackenzie turned his head slowly and looked at Trevelyan. Once he had seen a look in Trevelyan’s eyes— When he spoke it was as if he were thinking aloud. "How he loved some woman!"

Trevelyan moved restlessly and opened his eyes, and looked at Mackenzie and Clarke and then back to Mackenzie. There was nothing in his face that led them to suppose he had heard.

Mackenzie leaned over him.

"How are you?"

"Deuced bad," Trevelyan said slowly, and then the nausea returned.

The man in the next bed began to moan a little. Trevelyan turned to Mackenzie, a frown upon his face, as though he was trying to place the sound.

"What is it?" he asked. "What’s that noise?"

"It’s McHennessy—you’d better let us move you into our room."

Trevelyan shook his head.

"I suppose it’s a blamed silly notion, but I’d rather be with the men." And then he stretched out his cold hands suddenly and grasped Mackenzie’s convulsively, "The pain," he said.

Mackenzie looked up at Clarke and nodded to the question in the other’s eyes.

Mackenzie took out his handkerchief and wiped the great beads off Trevelyan’s forehead. When Clarke returned with the morphia, the nausea had come again.

Trevelyan waved Clarke aside.

"I don’t want it," he whispered hoarsely. "I couldn’t keep it down anyway, and—I—don’t—want it!"

And when he was not to be persuaded Mackenzie let him back slowly on the pillow.

All night the nausea lasted, but in the early morning there came cessation for a time, and Mackenzie left Clarke with him, and went to snatch a bit of sleep.

Clarke watched by him in silence—dumb with the terribleness of it all; dumb with his own powerlessness to help—and Trevelyan was grateful for the cessation and the silence.

When the cessation came his thoughts went out to Cary, and they drew the memory of her face to him. It was in truth a dream of heaven—and real, untouched by the thralldom of the morphia.

He was growing weaker—he could feel the ebbing of his strength—and he did not care. In the morning he had fought against it, as he had fought everything all his life—passionately, but now with the cessation and the coming of the dream face, he did not care.

He clung to the vision of the dream though, fiercely, as though fearing it would escape him and be lost forever. He had loved her, and he loved her still!

His love for her had been as a mountain that has been stripped in a storm of its fairest foliage; that has been wrecked by a great fire which has swept it of all its rarest beauty, leaving only the bareness of the boulders, but withstanding the wreck of the storm and the fire. So his love had stood and endured as a sample of the Eternal Handiwork—a basis of his life, as is love the basis of the life of the Everlasting.

He was conscious of the clasp of Clarke’s fingers on his wrist, and the sudden appearance of a frightened orderly with the intelligence that Burns, in the next ward, was worse, and would he come at once; and he was dimly conscious of Clarke’s bending over him and of his telling him to go to Burns, but he still clung to the vision of the dream face. Desperately he clung to it, even when the blessed cessation suddenly ceased, and it seemed as though he was being engulfed in a great abyss of unspeakable agony, and he kept his thoughts upon it as a crusader would have kept his dying thoughts upon the unattainable quest.

And then he became dimly conscious of a low moaning sound and he lay still trying, to place it, because Mackenzie was not there to tell him what it was, and he had forgotten what Mackenzie had said it was, but he still tried to concentrate his thoughts on the dream face that was growing faint and fainter. The effort was a complete failure, and the low moaning increased. He fixed it slowly as coming from the next bed. He turned his head toward it weakly. The incoherent ravings became a piteous and conscious cry for water.

The gray dawn crept in slowly and up to the trooper’s bed, and by its light Trevelyan could see him turning his head restlessly from side to side. Still the cry for water reached him.

It did not seem to affect him much at first, or pierce the consciousness of pity, but it annoyed him, and it kept coming between him and the dream face he was struggling so desperately to hold. And then it struck on him suddenly like a blow and he awoke to the man’s anguish and the man’s need—how often he had answered to that need and cry before! He looked toward the farthest corner of the room where an orderly lay sleeping from exhaustion. The man was half sick anyway, from a recent attack of the scourge. He did not want to call him; but if he would only awaken—if he only would.

He waited. There was no sound from the corner; there was no movement in the hall that would tell of Clarke’s return, and the low cry went on. Since the day he had joined Mackenzie he had followed and responded to that cry as the soldier follows and responds to the first low notes of the bugle. He pushed himself over to the edge of the bed and tried to sit up but the motion increased his agony and he lay still. He wondered blindly if he could do it. Then he let himself roll over the side of the bed and his big frame fell with a dull thud on the rough boards of the floor. He lay there a second, but there was no movement from the corner. He pulled himself up, took half a dozen steps toward the water bucket in the near corner, and then the cramp came back again in his legs, and he fell forward, and began to creep toward it on his hands and knees. The dream face was fading and being swallowed up in a breaking crest of white sea foam, and there seemed to be nothing in the world but the man’s cry and his own pain.

He reached the bucket and he dipped in the glass that stood near and filled it, and then began his slow journey to the man’s bed. By the deepening light in the east the man could see the great creeping figure approaching, and he drew back, afraid.

"It’s only I, McHennessy. I’ve got some water—" the voice trailed off, but the trooper caught the word "water" and he struggled to a reclining position and waited. The figure moved so slowly and his throat was a burning sheet of flame! Why didn’t he come faster—what was the matter that he didn’t come faster; and McHennessy’s blood-shot eyes were riveted on the slowly moving figure.

Trevelyan reached him at length and pulled himself up with a supreme effort, with the glass balanced very carefully in his hand. He was striving—striving too—after that elusive dream face.

He leaned over McHennessy with the water, and McHennessy with a sigh of ecstasy struggled up in his bed and leaned forward to touch his parched lips to the glass.

Trevelyan brought it up nearer and his hand wavered. He controlled it with a great effort of will for a moment, and then the glass trembled and its contents were spilt over McHennessy, and the glass crashed into shivers as it fell to the floor beside the bed. Trevelyan flung out his arms suddenly, groping for the dream face that had gone.

The orderly, awakened by the crash, started up and ran over to where Trevelyan lay on the floor by the side of McHennessy, who was swearing over the unexpected bath, and as he staggered beneath Trevelyan’s weight, Mackenzie came quickly forward from the threshold of the door. Together they carried Trevelyan back to bed and Mackenzie silently drew the coverings over his rigid body and stood looking down at the livid lips and listening to the slow, feeble breathing. Once he picked up the hand that lay on the outside of the covering and examined it, and then laid it back in its resting place.

Clarke who had heard the glass break, hurried in from the adjoining ward. Mackenzie looked up as he entered.

"_Collapse?_" asked Clarke briefly.

Mackenzie did not seem to hear him.

"Bring the salt—it’s just a chance," he said.

*XVIII.*

The light deepened in the east and the sunrise crept into the ward of the hospital and turned its search light curiously on the group in the furthest corner of the ward, and on the still figure on the bed. All morning the sunlight lingered around there as though it wanted to help Mackenzie in his fight, and impart into the chill of the rigid figure, some of its own warmth, and when the afternoon shadows came and drew it off, it retreated lingeringly, loath to say "good-night."

The shadows deepened and the quietness of midnight fell over the weary Station and the outlying cholera hospital. Mackenzie continued to sit by the bed.

The quietness outside crept in to meet the silence of the ward, and the night lamp cast strange shadows on the wall, at which Mackenzie stared. Once or twice he got up and visited the other beds and leaned over the men. Most were pulling through and were sleeping. McHennessy was drowsy with the morphia. Then Mackenzie would go back and sit down again by Trevelyan’s bed. At midnight, Clarke, with eyes heavy with sleep, came in. He did not speak but he looked down at Trevelyan and then up questionally to Mackenzie, and at the syringe and the salt lying near by.

"It didn’t work," said Mackenzie. "If you’ll listen to the lungs you’ll know why—pneumonia."

"You’d better go and rest a bit. I’ll stay—I won’t leave him," said Clarke, blinking at the light and wondering at the quietness of his own voice.

Mackenzie looked hard at the flickering night lamp.

"No," he said slowly. "I guess not."

After Clarke had gone back to their room, the surgeon riveted his eyes on Trevelyan’s sunken face, and once he put his hand out quickly and pressed it over the bloodshot eyes, but the lids opened again and would not remain closed. The slow labor of the feeble breathing went on. The almost imperceptible rise and fall of the great chest fascinated Mackenzie, and he found himself watching for it feverishly, hoping and yet dreading for it to cease.

While it was still dark he rose and went over to the window and looked out fixedly at the impenetrable pall of blackness that lay over the Station and the hospital. It seemed as though the heaviness of the blackness was over all the world.

By and by the night pall lifted a little, and a dull grayness crept into the heavens and rested on the station. He could dimly distinguish the outline of some of the military buildings. He turned away and went over to the lamp that was smoking and lowered it. From the trooper’s bed came a low moaning.

He paused to speak to him and then he went back to Trevelyan, and looked down at him, his eyes fixed on the great chest, watching for its slow rise and fall. Somehow he could not see the rise and fall—they did not seem to be there. He bent over him quickly.

"Trevelyan!" he called sharply.

The trooper in the next bed ceased moaning and raised himself on his arm painfully, and looked over to where Mackenzie was standing.

Mackenzie knelt down suddenly on one knee, and his hand passed rapidly from Trevelyan’s forehead to his pulse. The trooper in the next bed began to moan again.

Mackenzie laid his ear down quickly to the heart, an expectant look upon his face. Then he raised it slowly and bit his lip and stared hard through the window to where the barracks were defined against the paling grayness of the sky.

*XIX.*

The sunshine of the early summer lay heavy like a cloth of gold across the rolling Scottish country, and Stewart turned away abruptly from its brightness and stared down at the floor of the railway carriage.

All night he had lain awake, grasping fiercely at the bit of paper that had summoned him to the office of the Secretary for India, while his brain with equal fierceness refused to accept the tidings which had met him there.

He was dumbly grateful, however, for the friendship and the kindly interest that had led the Secretary, for his father’s sake, to send for him, and for the time that busy man had taken, and the consideration that had shielded him from seeing the latest cholera reports pasted up at the Office or in the columns of the press.

Some day he would thank the Secretary as he should. Just now it seemed to him his brain had become a burning blank, and that the fire was as unquenchable as it was mighty, forbidding thought. Once, twice, a dozen times he tried to picture Trevelyan as he had known him, but Trevelyan’s face would not come. He could not recall one line of it—he could not recall his voice—his slightest gesture; and he vaguely wondered if he were going mad, and when the rumble of the iron wheels would cease.

He was conscious of being grateful for the stopping of the noise, when he descended from the carriage, in the early light of the new day, to make his last connection with the local.

The local was late some two hours—it seemed to him twenty—and a feverish impatience came upon him to reach home and have it over with. The new faces around him were strange and looked at him curiously. There was a lean Scotch collie that sniffed at his heels and tried to make friends with him, and a small Scotch laddie, rosy-cheeked and freckled, who regarded him wonderingly from a safe distance, his forefinger in his mouth. Stewart noticed it was clean; he supposed it was too early for it to be covered with the conventional coat of dirt. The boy looked a little sleepy too. He wondered why he felt so wide awake himself. The collie licked at his boot. He neither encouraged nor rejected the familiarity. He simply ignored it. The morning sun was growing warm, and a bright patch of it touched the dress of the child. * * *

The local came around the curve and he got into the carriage, mechanically picking out his usual seat near the window. Force of habit is strong. There was a bit of rolling hillside and an old kirk down by a little stream he always looked out for.

He was alone and he was glad. The train jerked and backed a little and then fairly started on its run. It passed the hillside and the old kirk at the foot of the slope, and the bit of water that for a moment flashed the brightness of its sunlit surface upon his vision, and was gone. For the first time the landscape failed to please. Beyond the old kirk was another slope—a slope of heather, just putting forth its early pink; and though he could not see it he knew that just where the old road curved up to the kirk, the bracken grew.

Then the reaction came and his inertia broke and the burning blank became a sheet of memory. Trevelyan had loved the bracken and the heather so. As a laddie he had played among them and hidden himself—short kilts and all—beneath their bloom. Once he had gotten lost, and they had vainly searched for him, but Stewart slipping away unnoticed, and led by unerring instinct, had found him fast asleep down there—his head pillowed on the bracken and a faded scrap of heather in his small moist hand. And now the bracken might bloom on, and the sun might shine upon it by day and the stars smile down upon the heather slope by night, and the mist rest upon it, turning it to a mystical sheet of grayness and of silver—but Trevelyan would never walk across the slope again, and Stewart leaned his head against the window and closed his eyes.

All night the train had moved so slowly and he had dumbly longed that the iron wheels would hasten that he might reach home soon; and now that the home station in Aberdeen was nearly in sight, a sudden sickness seized him and he prayed for a delay.

He had wired ahead for Sandy to meet him with the trap instead of the cart in which he usually came for the mail. He had sent the message to Sandy instead of the family, and had bidden the Scotchman be silent about his unexpected return from London.

It was a comfort, he reflected, that Sandy could be trusted to hold his tongue. He felt he could not bear to have them meet him at the station. He could not tell them there, neither could he play a part so long—until they should reach home. He was trusting to that seven mile drive to collect himself. He hoped Maggie would not come with Sandy—as she sometimes did—to get the mail, especially when Cameron was away. Well, he would trust to Cameron’s being there, and to Sandy now—

He remembered the mail and the papers would arrive with him—he was glad for that in a dull way—if he could only reach home before the papers, he had thought before leaving Waterloo Station.

His father was in Glasgow with Kenneth. He could not spare them. There would be the Little Madre to be told, and Maggie and Tom Cameron, and Mactier—poor old Mactier—and Cary—he wiped the moisture from his mouth—and Trevelyan’s father lately returned from the far East—God help him. God help them all!

The local stopped. Through the window he could see Sandy waiting for him with the trap on the other side of the track, quieting the restless horses; Maggie had not come.

He got out—how he never afterwards remembered—and he stored his Gladstone safely away beneath the back seat, waited for the mail bag to be put in, and then climbed up with a nod to the red headed Scotchman and a "how are they all?" mechanically asked.

The old Scotchman looked at him curiously, as the child and the collie had done, and he was distinctly annoyed at being stared at.

The blacks, with their heads turned homeward, made good progress over the road—too good, Stewart thought, and once he sharply bade Sandy draw them in. Then as if ashamed of his impatience he inquired as to Sandy’s daughter, who had been ill. Sandy answered the question briefly, realizing that talking came amiss to-day, and then gave his attention to checking the rapid pace of the blacks, who were eager to get home.

The morning sun beat down upon them, but it seemed to Stewart that he was turned to ice and that he would never feel any warmth again. The station lay five miles or more beyond the point of home, and when he repassed the slope of heather and the old kirk road where the bracken grew, he turned his eyes away. It seemed to him he could never look upon or touch either the bracken or the heather again.

And the old road! Once they used to travel it together; they had traveled it in their earliest babyhood and again that dark night when Trevelyan had been brought from Argyll to make his home with them—a little, lonely, motherless lad of ten. They had crossed the old bridge so often; they had crossed it together that last time—_the last time_—and he had never known! He held on fast to the back of the seat in front, and moved his head a little—restlessly—as though it hurt. Henceforth there would be no more "togethers."

Sandy cleared his throat.

"There’s naething wrong, I hope, sir?" he asked a little timidly, but unable to bear the silence longer.

There was no answer. They were passing the heather slope and speech was not. And then Sandy, with an instinct not unusual in his race turned half around and blurted out:

"’Tis bad news ye’ve had from India, sir?"

Stewart looked past Sandy to the big fir that marked the boundary line of home, and nodded; and then he suddenly dropped his eyes and ran his finger, shaking as though with palsy, along the patent leather strip that bound back the corduroy of the seat.

"Mr. Trevelyan’s ill," asserted Sandy, unwilling to acknowledge the thought that came to him and which he knew was true. "You’re going to bring him back to Aberdeen—" Sandy hesitated.

Stewart looked away.

"Mr. Trevelyan will not come back to Aberdeen, Sandy—" he broke off.

The blacks trotted briskly over the road and the warm sunshine rested on the meadows and brightened everything but the big dark fir ahead. Somewhere in the copse near by a bird was singing.

The long home avenue was deserted except for McGuire, who was carefully clipping in his precise way the border of the walks, and McGuire leaned upon his shears, wondering why the young master had passed him with no sign of greeting.

There was no one else around. The house stood big and still in the sunshine, and the deserted terraces sloped away—like a vast piece of greenest velvet. Some of the windows were open, and from one of the upstairs casements a white curtain was fluttering in the breeze. It was his mother’s room. A restful quietness brooded over everything.

There was no one in the hall, flanked with its weapons and armor and paintings, and no sound from the breakfast room. Breakfast, he supposed, was long over. He had had none himself, but he was not conscious of the lack.

Someone was coming down the stairs. Stewart paused, a sudden heat replacing the chill that had possessed him until now. The sound came nearer and he recognized the halting step of Trevelyan’s father—Trevelyan’s father, who still bore that scar from Inkerman.

*XX.*

Trevelyan’s father stopped when he reached the foot of the stairs.

"Why, hello, boy, when did you get back? Thought you were in London for a fortnight."

"I thought so, too, sir, but you see, I—"

"Ho-ho, that’s it, is it?" His uncle laughed. "Well, I can’t blame you. She isn’t here, though—out with Maggie for a walk." He looked up quizzically into his nephew’s face, and then he looked away abruptly. Robert, too, loved the girl.

"Is she?" asked Stewart absently, and he turned toward the library, conscious that in the morning it was deserted, and that he could tell him there without fear of interruption. "The fact is, sir—"

Trevelyan’s father stopped short and looked his nephew over.

"What is it? What’s the trouble?" he asked concisely.

"Who—with me, sir? Nonsense; I’m all right."

"Was it Sir Archibald or that bit of diplomatic work?" The old man smiled grimly.

"Sir Archibald! I’m dismissed from his books long ago, sir. The diplomatic work promises well. By the way, have you heard the latest from Essex—" He sat down easily on the arm of a big leather chair and lounged across it; his face in shadow—. "It’s reported that Davidson is going to raise that dead and buried claim again."

"’A fool and his money—’" said the old officer, and sat down.

"Where’s the Little Madre?"

"Out listening to Margie’s woes. If her rheumatism don’t carry her off soon I’ll be inclined to do the job myself. Your mother is turning into her slave!" said his uncle testily.

"Margie’s rheumatism isn’t any worse than Ann Grafton’s stiff knee or Sam’s lame back," replied Stewart, swinging one foot against the side of the chair. "Mother always has been at the mercy of the tenants."

How was he to begin, he wondered.

He mechanically commenced to pull off his gloves.

"See here, John—" he glanced up quickly at Trevelyan’s father sitting in a black walnut chair carved a hundred years ago, his face shining out weather-beaten and grim from the dark background, and his voice more decided than Stewart had ever heard it—"Why did Robert leave the army?"

A glove dropped and lay at Stewart’s feet unnoticed. He moved restlessly.

"Why shouldn’t he? He had served his sub-lieutenancy. He got his commission—"

"To resign it. Exactly! Why?"

"He never liked the Army, sir; it was always the Navy with him from the first—"

"Is he with the Navy now?" The old officer tapped the floor impatiently with his heavy stick. "Why is he in India doing an orderly’s work instead of in the line?"

"Did you ever know Robert to stick to anything very long, sir?"

"Only one," said the old Briton shortly, and he thought of Cary. "You haven’t answered me."

Stewart rose, and his tone was final.

"Indeed, sir, it is not for me to say."

Trevelyan’s father clasped his hands over the knob of his stick, rested his chin on them and looked up at Stewart from under his shaggy brows—curiously.

"Well—well, since you won’t, you won’t, I suppose! I’ll have to wait until Robert comes back—"

Stewart wheeled abruptly and went over to the east window.

"After all, the boy is his own master," Trevelyan’s father said. "He’s whimsical and headstrong, too—" he broke off—"Everything was all straight, though—his getting out, I mean?" The deep eyes peered anxiously from the old officer’s weather-beaten face.

Stewart remained at the window, looking at the stretch of lawn. For the first time since his interview at the Secretary’s, his voice was broken.

"You need not be ashamed of Rob."

The old Briton drew a deep breath and he laughed a little—"After all, nothing else matters! I was sure of it!" and then again, "I—was—sure—of—it!"

Stewart began mechanically to count the number of rose bushes at the end of the terrace, and he made a great effort to steady his voice.

"By the way, this last idea of Robert’s—this cholera business—is a risky thing. Do you ever feel anxious, sir?"

"The boy’s foolhardy, but he’s got sense—" the Briton frowned.

"But even sense sometimes——"

The room was still. A bit of summer sunlight sifted through the oriel window. From the distance crept in the murmur of water breaking on the sand. McGuire was busy at the rose bushes near the terrace and the decided "click" of his shears and the soft music of the sea, were the only sounds that broke the quiet of the room.

"_John!_"

Trevelyan’s father rose and stood rigid by the old carved chair. Young Stewart turned and leaned against the woodwork. He grew afraid and trembled. He could not look upon that face.

"_Robert!_ That is why you have come back?"

He nodded.

The sunlight still sifted through the windows and played fitfully around the walnut carvings of the room and touched for a brief moment a bronze paper weight of the Dying Gaul. Someone standing in the open casement window at the south, stirred a little, and then Cary came swiftly down the length of the long room. A bit of heather from the armful she had gathered on the slope slipped from the bunch. The rest she threw upon the table as she passed it, and it lay there—its first, faint pink shining out against the black walnut. She went and stood by Trevelyan’s father, resting her hand upon his arm, and she looked up into his face.

"I left Maggie—I came ahead—I overheard—" she began disjointedly, "Robert—the cholera—Robert—?" and then as neither of the men spoke, she cried, "Oh, sir, indeed it may be a mistake—sometimes, you know the names—"

Trevelyan’s father looked down at the girl, and into her eyes full of unshed tears, and on the small white hand on his arm he placed his own—the one that had held the sabre at Inkerman. It was an old hand, thin and vividly veined, and it trembled.

"The report was signed by Mackenzie," said Stewart at last.

"There is some mistake—there _must_ be—the letters—" cried Cary.

"We will have to wait for the letters, child." Trevelyan’s father turned away.

Stewart came up to her.

"It was at the India Office yesterday—the Secretary—after all—" he broke off.

She looked from one to the other, but she still stood by Trevelyan’s father. Suddenly she sat down in the high backed chair he had occupied, clinging to his hand, her eyes on his face. Stewart went back to the window.

"But think what he did——"

Trevelyan’s father looked down at her again and his face twitched.

"He was always a brave laddie," he said, and his face was wet with tears.

Cary raised the hand she was holding and pressed it to her cheek, and she held it there—brown and thin and heavily veined—against the delicate texture, and caressed it in the way that women have.

"He was a great soul. I always knew it! I—always—knew—it—" she told them brokenly.

"He was a Briton," said the old officer of the Empire. "I didn’t always understand him—I blamed him for doing an orderly’s work. I’m proud of him—but if it had been anything but the cholera—I saw it once myself in Bombay; I ran away from it—" he raised his head, "anything but _that_! But—I’m proud of him!"

Stewart still stood by the oriel window leaning against his arm flung over his head, and he was crying—hardly and bitterly as a man cries. The stillness of the outside world increased. The sun crept into the corner of the room.

"I can’t quite take it in—" said the old man slowly, looking past the girl to a far-off field of thistle and staring at the purplish bloom. "It’s hard to think of Robert—gone!"

And then:

"I can’t think of the rest—the details—" he clenched his hands fiercely, "the pain—the thirst—" and his eyes came back to Cary. "There! There! There’s something about it all that we can’t understand, I fancy, but there is the honor—that thing which does not perish with the using!"

He turned abruptly, and when Cary, half fearful for him, would have followed, he motioned her away, and went out alone on the back terrace.

Stewart had not moved from the window, and Cary went and stood beside him, gravely looking out at the sunlight shifting on the lawn. She did not say anything, but as though conscious that they were alone, he spoke, his face still hidden on his arm.

"I did it," he said at last in a broken voice of confession. "I _did_ think to help him best by making him get away from the old crowd and the regiment—but it was because I thought of the Service, too—and I judged _him_——!"

She waited, and she did not speak, but she slipped one of her hands into the pocket of his tweed coat and held on to it.

"I broke his life—he loved _me_ better than that—" he began.

"Do you call a life that ended _so_—broken?"

He raised his face from his arm and looked at her.

"No—no—I didn’t mean that—but think of my judging him! All last night it came back to me—I thought I was going stark mad." And he brushed away the tears clumsily.

"It all hurts _so_! But, by and by—" she looked straight out of the oriel window, and she spoke disjointedly, and somehow she thought of western Scotland, and his sword. "I knew when we got those letters from Argyll—when I got my letter—Rob wasn’t coming back to us."

Stewart drew her to him.

"Oh! Cary, tell me that it doesn’t mean to you all—all that it might have done! Lassie—tell me——"

She smiled a little.

"You are foolish," she told him. "You know I love you," and then looking into his eyes—"It is only you."

He hid his mouth against the soft coil of her hair.

"Last night, I was almost jealous of the dead," he whispered, "and then when I passed the heather fields to-day—and the bracken—" his voice broke.

"I know," she said simply. "It is always the bracken and the heather—and Rob—isn’t it?"

From the south window the sun poured into the room and lighted up the heavy carvings of black walnut. The bit of heather still lay upon the floor and withered there. A silent linnet perched itself upon the window sill.

Somewhere from beyond the turn in the wooded drive, Maggie was coming home, singing:

"Some talk of Alexander, And some of Hercules, Of Hector and Lysander, And such great names as these!"

A man’s heavy halting step came from the back terrace. In the stillness they could hear him mount the stairs.

"But of all the world’s great heroes— There’s none that—"

Somewhere upstairs a door closed.

* * * * * * * *

_*Selections from*_

*LOTHROP PUBLISHING COMPANY’S*

_*List of Books*_

*D’ri and I*

A Tale of Daring Deeds in the Second War with the British; being the Memoirs of Colonel Ramon Bell, U.S.A.

By IRVING BACHELLER, author of "Eben Holden." With six illustrations by F. C. YOHN. 12mo, cloth, rough edges, gilt top, decorated cover, $1.50

Following the marvellous success of "Eben Holden," Mr. Bacheller gives to the public another stirring and delightful story of the North Country he loves so well. It is a tale of the days when the French _emigrés_, fleeing from the Reign of Terror, built their chateaux and mansions in the northern counties of New York; the days when England tried issue again with the young republic, and when Darius Olin, "quaint, rugged, wise, and truthful," with young Ramon Bell, two types of the men who have helped to make America, rode into the Lake Champlain region to adventure, love, and danger. It is a rare story of Yankee valor, Yankee humor, and Yankee pluck.

Eben Holden

A Tale of the North Country

By IRVING BACHELLER. Bound in red silk cloth, decorative cover, gilt top, rough edges. Size, 5x7¾. Price, $1.50

The most popular book in America.

Within eight months after publication it had reached its two hundred and fiftieth thousand. The most American of recent novels, it has indeed been hailed as the long looked for "American novel."

William Dean Howells _says of it_: "I have read ’Eben Holden’ with a great joy in its truth and freshness. You have got into your book a kind of life not in literature before, and you have got it there simply and frankly. It is ’as pure as water and as good as bread.’"

Edmund Clarence Stedman _says of it_: "It is a forest-scented, fresh-aired, bracing, and wholly American story of country and town life."

When the Land was Young

Being the True Romance of Mistress Antoinette Huguenin and Captain Jack Middleton

By EMILY LAFAYETTE McLAWS. Bound in green cloth, illustrated cover, gilt top, rough edges. Seven drawings by Will Crawford. Size, 5x7¾. Price, $1.50

Among the entertaining romances that are based upon the colonial days of American history this novel will take rank as one of the most notable. It is picturesque in location, environment, and action; charming in detail and motive; dramatic in method; virile in characteristics; and altogether absorbing in plot and surprises. The hero, Captain Middleton, of Charleston in the Carolinas, is a real man; the heroine, Antoinette Huguenin, a beauty of King Louis’ Court, is one of the most attractive figures in romance; while Lumulgee, the great war chief of the Choctaws, and Sir Henry Morgan, the Buccaneer Knight and terror of the Spanish Main, divide the honors with hero and heroine. The time was full of border wars between the Spaniards of Florida and the English colonists, and against this historical background Miss McLaws has thrown a story that is absorbing, dramatic, and brilliant.

A Carolina Cavalier

A Romance of the Carolinas

By GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON

Bound in red silk cloth, Illustrated cover, gilt top, rough edges. Six drawings by C. D. Williams. Size, 5 x 7¾. Price $1.50

A strong, delightful romance of Revolutionary days, most characteristic of its vigorous author, George Cary Eggleston. The story is founded on absolute happenings and certain old papers of the historic Rutledges of Carolina. As a love story, it is sweet and true; and as a patriotic novel it is grand and inspiring. The historic setting, and the fact that it is distinctively and enthusiastically American, have combined to win instant success for the book.

Louisville Courier Journal: "A fine story of adventure, teeming with life and aglow with color."

Cleveland World: "There is action, plot, and fire. Love and valor and loyalty play a part that enhances one’s respect for human nature."

Baltimore Sun: "The story is full of movement. It is replete with adventure. It is saturated with love."

J. Devlin—Boss

A Romance of American Politics

By FRANCIS CHURCHILL WILLIAMS. 12mo, $1.50

This is a story of the typical figure in the shaping of American life. "Jimmy," shrewd, strong, resourceful, clean-hearted, is vital; and the double love story which is woven about him gives an absolutely true and near view of the American boss. The revelations of political intrigue—from the governing of a ward to the upsetting of the most sensational Presidential Convention which this country has seen—are, as sketched in this romance, of intense interest; the scenes and characters in them are almost photographic. But above all of these stands Jimmy himself, unscrupulous as a politician, honorable as a man—Jimmy, the playmate, the counselor, and the lover of the winsome, clear-eyed Kate, the stanch friend of herself and of her son—Jimmy, with a straight word always for those who are true to him, a helping hand for all who need it, and a philosophy which is irresistible.

A Princess of the Hills

A Story of Italy

By MRS. BURTON HARRISON. Bound in Green Cloth, Decorative Cover, Gilt Top, Rough Edges. Four Drawings by ORSON LOWELL. Size, 7¾ x 5. $1.50.

Mrs. Burton Harrison is a charming story-teller. Unlike her other novels, "A Princess of the Hills" is not a romance of New York society, nor of Colonial times, but is a story of Italian life. An American tourist retreats from a broken engagement at Venice to that section of the North Italian Alps known as the Dolomites. Here he encounters a daughter of the soil, the last of a noble race, but now a humble peasant girl,—a real princess of the hills. The complications of the situation; the aroused interest of the American; the rival lovers, English, American, and Italian; the fierceness of the feud this love engenders; the struggle for possession and its unexpected outcome and denouement,—are told with masterly skill and with an interest that remains unflagging to the end.

The Kidnapped Millionaires

A Story of Wall Street and Mexico

By FREDERICK U. ADAMS. 12mo, cloth, $1.50

One of the most timely and startling stories of the day. A plan to form a great Newspaper Trust, evolved in the brain of an enterprising special correspondent, leads to the kidnapping of certain leading Metropolitan millionaires and marooning them luxuriously on a Mexican headland; the results—the panic in Wall Street, the search for the kidnapped millionaires, their discovery and rescue are the chief motives of the story, which has to do also with trusts, syndicates, newspaper methods, and all the great monetary problems and financial methods of the day. The story is full of adventure, full of humor, and full of action and surprises, while the romance that develops in its progress is altogether charming and delightful.

The Famous Pepper Books

By MARGARET SIDNEY

The Adventures of Joel Pepper

Bound in green cloth, decorative cover. Thirteen drawings by Sears Gallagher. Size, 5 x 7¾. Price, $1.50

As all the world knows, the Peppers grew up long ago, but some of the deeds of Joel are not recorded in the Pepper books, and hence this new one.

The Stories Polly Pepper Told

One volume, 12mo. Illustrated by Jessie McDermott and Etheldred B. Barry, $1.50

A charming "addenda" to the famous "Five Little Pepper Stories."

Five Little Peppers and How They Grew

12mo, illustrated, $1.50

"A genuine child classic."

Five Little Peppers Midway

12mo, illustrated, $1.50

"Every page is full of sunshine."—_Detroit Free Press_.

Five Little Peppers Grown Up

12mo, fully illustrated, cloth, $1.50

Phronsie Pepper

Illustrated by Jessie McDermott. 12mo, cloth, $1.50

This closing book of the now world-famous series of the "Five Little Pepper Books" has been enthusiastically welcomed by all the boys and girls of America to whom the Five Little Peppers have been dear ever since they first appeared in the "Little Brown House."

Lothrop Publishing Company - - Boston