lry regiment.

"They didn't ask many questions," he wrote, "so I hadn't to tell many
lies. You see, I can ride well and understand horses. If I get knocked
out, it won't be much loss, and I know you'll look after Fay's kiddies.
If I come through, perhaps I can make a fresh start somewhere. I've
always been fond of a gamble, and this is the biggest gamble I've ever
struck."

Jan showed the letter to Peter, who gave it back to her with something
like a groan: "Even the wrong 'uns get their chance, and yet I have to
go back and do a deadly dull job, just because it _is_ my job."

Peter went up to town and two days after came down again to "The Green
Hart" to say good-bye. He had got his marching orders and was to sail in
the _Somali_ from Southampton. Some fifteen hundred civilians and
officers serving in India were sailing by that boat and the _Dongola_.

By every argument he could bring forward he tried to get Jan to marry
him before he sailed. Yet just because she wanted to do it so much, she
held back. She, too, she kept telling herself, had her job, and she knew
that if she was Peter's wife, nothing, not even her dear Fay's children,
could be of equal importance with Peter.

The children and Meg and the household had by much thinking grown into a
sort of Frankenstein's monster of duty.

Her attitude was incomprehensible to Peter. It seemed to him to be
wrong-headed and absurd, and he began to lose patience with her.

On his last morning he sought and found her beside the sun-dial in the
wrens' garden.

Meg had taken little Fay to see Lady Mary's Persian kittens, but Tony
preferred to potter about the garden with the aged man who was trying to
replace Earley. William was not allowed to call upon the kittens, as
Fatima, their mother, objected to him vehemently, and Tony cared to go
nowhere if William might not be of the party.

Peter came to Jan and took both her hands and held them.

"It's the last time I shall ask you, my dear. If you care enough, we
can have these last days together. If you don't I must go, for I can't
bear any more of this. Either you love me enough to marry me before I
sail or you don't love me at all. Which is it?"

"I do love you, you know I do."

"Well, which is it to be?"

"Peter, dear, you must give me more time. I haven't really faced it all.
I can't do anything in such a hurry as that."

Peter looked at her and shook his head.

"You don't know what caring is," he said. "I c