ought waking and growing, and awake again
and itching after I had done my best to kill it, that the Major might
be moved by the story of an old shipmate brought so low. God forgive
me, ladies!" Captain Branscome put up a hand to cover his brow.
"The very telling of it degrades me over again; but I came here to
make a clean breast, and there is no other way. I had cross-examined
Harry about the Major and his habits--not always allowing to myself
why I asked him many trivial questions. And then suddenly the
temptation came to a head. Certain Englishmen discharged from the
French war-prisons were landed at Plymouth. The town turned out to
welcome the poor fellows home, and the Mayor entertained them at a
banquet, to which also he invited some two hundred townsmen.
Among the guests he was good enough to include me; for it has been a
consolation to me, ladies, and a source of pride, that my friends in
Falmouth have not withdrawn in adversity the respect which in old
days my uniform commanded."

"Captain Branscome is not telling you the half of it," I broke in
eagerly. "Every one in Falmouth knows him to be a hero. Why, he has
a sword of honour at home, given him for one of the bravest battles
ever fought!"

"Gently, boy--gently!" Captain Branscome corrected me, with a smile,
albeit a sad one. "Youth is generous, ladies; it sees these things
through a haze which colours and magnifies them, and--and it's a very
poor kind of hero you'll consider me before I have done. Where was
I? Ah, yes, to be sure--the banquet. His Worship can little have
guessed what his invitation meant to me, or that, while others
thanked him for a compliment, to me it offered a satisfying meal such
as I had not eaten for months. Mr. Stimcoe had given the school a
holiday. In short, I attended.

"I fear, ladies, that the food and the generous wine together must
have turned my head--there is no other explanation; for when the meal
was over and I sat listening to the speeches, but fumbling with a
glass of port before me, scarcely with the half-crown in my pocket
which must carry me over another week's house-keeping, all of a
sudden the man inside me rose in revolt. I felt such poverty as mine
to be unendurable, and that I was a slave, a spiritless fool, to put
up with it. There must be hundreds of good, Christian folk in the
world who had only to know to stretch out a hand of help and gladly,
as I would have helped such a case in the da