nd assuredly none but a soldier could enter into the
joy with which Lenox stood swaying dizzily beside his beloved guns,
while he and Brownlow pitched eight-and-twenty shells into the
fortified village below the last one, to their shameless satisfaction,
lighting on the mosque itself, and lifting the Mullah, with his green
flag of victory, twenty feet into the air.

It was a more or less damaged and dejected party of five which
assembled in the small mess tent that night.

So much had been lost, so little gained by the day's disaster: an
epitome of too many 'regrettable incidents' beyond the Border. The
costliest item of Frontier defence is this unavoidable waste of the
lives of picked soldiers. The Sikhs had lost heavily in Native
officers and men. Colonel Montague had succumbed to his wounds during
the retirement. Norton and Richardson, both too severely hurt to
appear at mess, were officially in hospital,--that is to say, on
stretchers in two field service tents: and three out of the five men at
the mess table had brought away superfluous mementoes of Waziri
marksmanship.

Lenox himself had suffered more from loss of blood than from the flesh
wound in his shoulder, which was not a serious affair; and to Desmond's
broken wrist had been added a disfiguring slash across his cheek. No
doubt orders and commendation awaited them: but their elation at the
prospect was hushed by the very present shadow of death. For the
soldier, inured as he is, does not count death a little thing. He
cannot, any more than the rest of us, 'go out of the warm sunshine
easily.' And the thought of Montague's wife and children, of Unwin's
'No more dancing attendance on Waziris,' intruded unsought, breaking
the thread of common speech.

No doubt, also, Desmond and Lenox were thinking, manlike, of their own
wives; and thanking God for wounds that would only let loose the
woman's divine reserves of tenderness, her passion for 'mothering' the
man she loves. Once during the evening they exchanged a glance of
comprehension,--the freemasonry of those who love,--and the same
question sprang simultaneously to their minds. "How about poor Norton?
Would the news bring that wife of his back to Dera Ishmael in the last
week of March?" And Desmond decided that if it did not, Norton must be
persuaded to put up with them, and submit to Honor's ministrations, in
whose power to soothe and bless he had the faith of a little child, or
of a great m