hat lies in my power to rescue him. If I fail,
I'll follow on and report at Gand in the morning."

For a little while none spoke. The other men marched in silence, a
safeguard which they had made a rigid rule while piercing their way by
night through an unknown country held by an enemy who would not have
given quarter to any English soldier.

Bates was really a very sharp fellow. He had sense enough to know that
he had said enough already. Dalroy's use of Irene's title conveyed a
hint of complications rather beyond the ken of one whose acquaintance
with the facts was limited to an overheard conversation between
strangers. Moreover, soldier that he was, the corporal realised that one
of his own officers was not only deliberately risking his life in order
to save that of a Belgian peasant, but felt in honour bound to do no
less.

So Irene was left to tread the narrow path unaided. To her lasting
credit, she neither flinched nor faltered.

"We may find it difficult to reach Gand, so I'll wait for you in Ostend,
Arthur," she said composedly.

Now, these two young people had just been snatched from death, or worse,
in a manner which, a few weeks earlier, the least critical reader of
romantic fiction would have denounced as so wildly improbable that
imagination boggled at it. Irene, too, had unmistakably told the man who
had never uttered a word of the love that was consuming him that neither
rank nor wealth could interpose any barrier between them. It was hard,
almost unbearable, that they should be parted in the very hour when
freedom might truly come with the dawn.

Dalroy trudged a good twenty paces before he dared trust his voice. Even
then, he blurted out, not the measured agreement which his brain
dictated, but a prayer from his very heart. "May God bless and guard
you, dear!" was what he said, and Irene's response was choked by a
pitiful little sob.

Suddenly Dalroy, whose hearing was quickened by the training of Indian
_shikar_, touched the corporal's arm, and stood fast. Bates gave a
peculiar click in his throat, and the squad halted, each man's feet
remaining in whatever position they happened to be at the moment.

"Horses coming this way," breathed Dalroy.

"Right, sir. This'll be your two, with Jan wot's-his-name, I hope. Leave
them to us, sir.--Smithy, Macdonald, and Shiner--forward!"

Three shapes materialised close to the trio in front. The rain was still
pelting down, and the trees nearly met over