n fate, I meant. Whether I be captain or a corporal cannot
alter----"

He paused; he dreaded lest the word should escape him which should
reveal to her that which she would regard as such intolerable offense,
such insolent indignity, when felt for her by a soldier in the grade he
held.

"No? Yet such recognition is usually the ambition of every military
life."

A very weary smile passed over his face.

"I have no ambition, madame. Or, if I have, it is not a pair of
epaulettes that will content it."

She understood him; she comprehended the bitter mockery that the tawdry,
meretricious rewards of regimental decoration seemed to the man who had
waited to die at Zaraila as patiently and as grandly as the Old Guard at
Waterloo.

"I understand! The rewards are pitifully disproportionate to the
services in the army. Yet how magnificently you and your men, as I have
been told, held your ground all through that fearful day!"

"We did our duty--nothing more."

"Well! is not that the rarest thing among men?"

"Not among soldiers, madame."

"Then you think that every trooper in a regiment is actuated by the
finest and most impersonal sentiment that can actuate human beings!"

"I will not say that. Poor wretches! They are degraded enough, too
often. But I believe that more or less in every good soldier, even when
he is utterly unconscious of it, is an impersonal love for the honor of
his Flag, an uncalculating instinct to do his best for the reputation of
his corps. We are called human machines; we are so, since we move by no
will of our own; but the lowest among us will at times be propelled by
one single impulse--a desire to die greatly. It is all that is left to
most of us to do."

She looked at him with that old look which he had seen once or twice
before in her, of pity, respect, sympathy, and wonder, all in one. He
spoke to her as he had never spoken to any living being. The grave,
quiet, listless impassiveness that still was habitual with him--relic of
the old habits of his former life--was very rarely broken, for his
real nature or his real thoughts to be seen beneath it. But she, so far
removed from him by position and by circumstance, and distant with him
as a great lady could not but be with a soldier of whose antecedents and
whose character she knew nothing, gave him sympathy, a sympathy that
was sweet and rather felt than uttered; and it was like balm to a wound,
like sweet melodies on a weary ear, to th