“You are a serious one,” he said very sagely, “a fastidious, serious one. When you look at me I feel that you are very sorry for me—that poor Gerard—and that you know I can’t help it. And when there are Generals about, I point to you and say loudly: ‘Ah, there is a serious one who will go far!’ But here privately I am afraid for you, Paul. I say to myself, ‘He is not of stone. Some day things will happen with that serious one, and where we common people scrape our shins, he will break his neck. When we amuse ourselves for a month, he will marry the Sergeant-Major’s daughter.’ ”

Paul had heard this homily a good many times before. He just went on writing as if his friend were not in the room.

“But I am not sure that something has not already happened to you—oh, a long time ago.”

Paul’s pen stopped abruptly, but he did not look up from the page.

“Why are you not sure?” he asked.

“Because you have compassions and sympathies and little delicacies of thought which the rest of us have not. The garrisons of the Colonial army and the coast towns of North Africa are not the natural soil for such harvests. Some long time ago, a thing has happened, eh?”

“No,” said Paul. He gathered his papers together and got up. Gerard was beginning to guess a little too shrewdly. “But I will tell you what is going to happen. I am going with you to the Villa Iris.”

The nine years which had passed since Paul had listened through an evening to Colonel Vanderfelt had written less upon his face than on his character. He hardly looked older, nor had he lost the elusive grace which made others warm to him from the outset of acquaintanceship. But he had now the ease, the restful quality of a man who has found himself. Youth which is solitary is given to luxuriate in woe, but the years of companionship, of friendly rivalry, of strenuous effort, and a little trifle of achievement had enabled Paul Ravenel to contemplate the blot upon his name with a much less tragic eye than when it had first been revealed to him. He had hurried from Colonel Vanderfelt’s house to France and for a week had roamed the woods of Fontainebleau sunk in such an exaggeration of shame that he shunned all speech and company and felt himself a leper. Paul remembered that week now with amazement and scorn. He had served throughout the Chaiouïa Campaign, from the capture of Settat, right on to the wonderful three weeks in March when with the speed and the mobility of Stonewall Jackson’s 

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