enough for the boy. Straightway
he had a vivid picture before his mind, and as he listened to the men
at the dinner-table, their rough clipped words set him down in the
midst of their battlefields, he heard the drone of bullets, he
quivered expecting the shock of a charge. But of all the Crimean
nights this had been fraught with the most torments.

His father had told a story with a lowered voice, and in his usual
jerky way. But the gap was easy to fill up.

"A Captain! Yes, and he bore one of the best names in all England.
It seemed incredible, and mere camp rumour. But the rumour grew with
every fight he was engaged in. At the battle of Alma the thing was
proved. He was acting as galloper to his General. I believe, upon my
soul, that the General chose him for this duty so that the man might
set himself right. He was bidden to ride with a message a quarter of a
mile, and that quarter of a mile was bullet-swept. There were enough
men looking on to have given him a reputation, had he dared and come
through. But he did not dare, he refused, and was sent under arrest to
his tent. He was court-martialled and broken. He dropped out of his
circle like a plummet of lead; the very women in Piccadilly spat if
he spoke to them. He blew his brains out three years later in a back
bedroom off the Haymarket. Explain that if you can. Turns tail, and
says 'I daren't!' But you, can you explain it? You can only say it's
the truth, and shrug your shoulders. Queer, incomprehensible things
happen. There's one of them."

Geoffrey, however, understood only too well. He was familiar with many
phases of warfare of which General Faversham took little account, such
as, for instance, the strain and suspense of the hours between the
parading of the troops and the first crack of a rifle. He took that
story with him up the great staircase, past the portraits to his bed.
He fell asleep only in the grey of the morning, and then only to dream
of a crisis in some hard-fought battle, when, through his cowardice,
a necessary movement was delayed, his country worsted, and those dead
men in the hall brought to irretrievable shame. Geoffrey's power to
foresee in one flash all the perils to be encountered, the hazards to
be run, had taught him the hideous possibility of cowardice. He was
now confronted with the hideous fact. He could not afterwards clear
his mind of the memory of that evening.

He grew up with it; he looked upon himself as a born coward, a