imea, and
a fresh story was always in the telling before its predecessor was
ended. They were stories of death, of hazardous exploits, of the pinch
of famine, and the chill of snow. But they were told in clipped words
and with a matter-of-fact tone, as though the men who related them were
only conscious of them as far-off things; and there was seldom a comment
more pronounced than a mere "That's curious," or an exclamation more
significant than a laugh.

But Harry Feversham sat listening as though the incidents thus
carelessly narrated were happening actually at that moment and within
the walls of that room. His dark eyes--the eyes of his mother--turned
with each story from speaker to speaker, and waited, wide open and
fixed, until the last word was spoken. He listened fascinated and
enthralled. And so vividly did the changes of expression shoot and
quiver across his face, that it seemed to Sutch the lad must actually
hear the drone of bullets in the air, actually resist the stunning shock
of a charge, actually ride down in the thick of a squadron to where guns
screeched out a tongue of flame from a fog. Once a major of artillery
spoke of the suspense of the hours between the parading of the troops
before a battle and the first command to advance; and Harry's shoulders
worked under the intolerable strain of those lagging minutes.

But he did more than work his shoulders. He threw a single furtive,
wavering glance backwards; and Lieutenant Sutch was startled, and indeed
more than startled,--he was pained. For this after all was Muriel
Graham's boy.

The look was too familiar a one to Sutch. He had seen it on the faces of
recruits during their first experience of a battle too often for him to
misunderstand it. And one picture in particular rose before his
mind,--an advancing square at Inkermann, and a tall big soldier rushing
forward from the line in the eagerness of his attack, and then stopping
suddenly as though he suddenly understood that he was alone, and had to
meet alone the charge of a mounted Cossack. Sutch remembered very
clearly the fatal wavering glance which the big soldier had thrown
backward toward his companions,--a glance accompanied by a queer sickly
smile. He remembered too, with equal vividness, its consequence. For
though the soldier carried a loaded musket and a bayonet locked to the
muzzle, he had without an effort of self-defence received the Cossack's
lance-thrust in his throat.

Sutch glance