d place at her side.

"Why, yes," she said. "Were you not wounded in the Sudan? Uncle Rufus
told me that you were. He read about it in the papers. A Major
Bennett, or somebody, ran out under a heavy fire and pulled you out of
the hands of a lot of Arabs and saved your life."

I laughed. I would have given all I owned in the world to have had at
that moment an interesting and conspicuous wound, for I knew how
sympathy formed love, and how to a woman's mind a wound added interest
to a man. A few weeks ago, though unwounded, I had at least been very
thin and brown; but even of those mild attractions I had thoughtlessly
allowed myself to be robbed by too high living and a kinder sun than
the desert's. How I envied Bennett with his sunken eyes and tottering
gait!

"The telegraph evidently mixed the names," I said. "It was Bennett who
was shot."

"And you saved his life!" Penelope cried, forgetting herself.

However modest the man may be who hides his light under a bushel, it is
always pleasing to him to have another lift the basket. As a matter of
fact, on that morning at Omdurman it was almost as uncomfortable in the
disordered and retreating ranks as it was in our rear, where Bennett
lay crushed in the sand under his dead camel. If I did run back to him
in the face of the oncoming horde of dervishes, a half-dozen of his own
black troopers ran with me and helped to drag him to safety. It was an
ordinary incident of the heat of battle, yet I did wish that Bennett
were here to tell her about it, with his grateful exaggeration. To me
fell the hard task not only of hiding my light, but of blowing it out.

"We got him away," I returned carelessly, accenting the pronoun as
though the whole corps were concerned. "A lot of his men ran back to
him and put him on my horse. I simply led him out of danger."

"Oh!" Penelope exclaimed in a tone of disappointment.

She looked over the plain; and I beside her, with my stick bent across
my knee, studied her face, trying to read in it some promise of
kindness and hope. But I found none. She seemed lost in the fair
prospect. She had met an old friend and had spoken to him. That was
enough. Now it mattered little whether he went away or stayed. It
came to me then to try an old, old ruse to test the quality of her
indifference.

"We had best be going," I said, rising.

To my consternation she rose, too, and began to move off carelessly, as
though she expected me