understand perhaps now our queer reception of you in the drawing room this evening. When you startled us by calling me, ‘The man with the medals,’ it sounded like some bitter jibe from those bad days.”

“But I don’t understand,” Paul Ravenel stammered. “You were cashiered both of you, you and my father?”

“Both of us.”

“Yet I saw you coming from a dinner at the Guildhall, with your medals upon your breast. You are here in your own home, wearing your rank! How can that be, sir?”

Colonel Vanderfelt replied with a curious accent of apology to his young guest.

“I was lucky. I had served in India longer than your father. I had been more interested; and dialects came to me easily. More than once I had spent my leave living in the Bazaars, and as far north as Leh. Therefore it wasn’t so difficult for me. I disappeared. I’m a dark man naturally. I grew a beard. I joined a battalion of irregular levies. I served for three years in it on the frontier.”

“Did no one guess who you were?”

“I think one or two suspected and—winked. They were busy years you see. A good deal was going on all this time and men who knew anything about soldiering were valuable. Of course they were pretty rough, hard years for any one with delicate tastes, but there was so much to be perhaps regained,” and Colonel Vanderfelt pulled himself up quickly. “Well, after three years I was wounded rather badly. As you see I limp to this day. It looked then as if the game was up altogether and I was going out. So I sent a message in my own name to an officer on the border whom I had known. The Governor of Quetta came up himself to see me in hospital and the end of it was that my sentence was annulled. There, my boy, that’s the whole story.”

Colonel Vanderfelt rose from his chair and limping over to the window looked out upon that quiet garden, which he had lost, and after such unlovely years won back again. They were years of which he could never think even now without a shiver of disgust and a cold fear lest by some impossibility they should come again. None indeed had ever known the full measure of their abasement and squalor and degradation. Even with the great prize continually held in view, they had been hardly endurable. The chance of winning it had been the chance of a raft to a man drowning in the Pacific. The voice of Paul Ravenel who was still seated at the table broke in upon him.

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