casting anxious glances at the windows. To his great relief it was not
Jane who opened the door, but a new servant.

"Is Miss Fenleigh in?" he stammered. "Will you tell her a--a private
soldier has brought her something from an officer who died in Egypt?"

The girl showed him into the old, quiet parlour (as if he could not
have found the way thither himself), and there left him. It was very
still. Nothing broke the silence but the sleepy tick of the clock, and
the sound of some one (Jakes, perhaps) raking gravel on the garden
path. Everything was unaltered. There was the little bust of Minerva
that Barbara had once adorned with a paper bonnet; the fretsaw bookcase
that the two boys had made at school; and the quaint little
glass-fronted cupboard, let into the panelling, from which the watch
had been stolen. In the years that had passed, only one thing in the
room had changed, and that was the tall figure in uniform standing on
the hearthrug.

He turned to look at himself in the glass. The dark moustache, bronzed
skin, red tunic with its white collar and badges of the "royal tiger;"
all these things had never been reflected there before, and for the
twentieth time during the last half-hour he sought to reassure himself
with the thought that his disguise was complete. "She'll never
recognize me!" he muttered. "It's all right." Then the door opened,
and for an instant his heart seemed to stop beating.

The same easy dignity and graciousness of manner, the same sweet
womanly face, and the same depths of love and ready sympathy in her
clear, calm eyes. She was dressed in mourning, and at her throat was
the brooch containing the locks of the children's hair. Jack noticed
it at once, and saw, too, that the little silver locket still had its
place among the gold trinkets on her watch chain; and the sight of it
very nearly brought him down upon his knees at her feet.

She seemed smaller than ever, and now, standing in front of him, her
upturned face was about on a level with the medals on his breast.

What was it made his chest heave and his lips tremble as he encountered
her gaze? However foolish and headstrong he might have been in the
past, he knew he had only to declare himself and it would all be
forgotten and forgiven. "You may doubt us," Valentine had said, "but
we have never lost faith in you." Yes, that was it; she loved her ugly
duckling, believing even now that, in spite of outward appearances, i