fe,
what I mean to do now. You are in full possession of the facts of the
case. You have defined my position fairly accurately. I did know you
were in an impossible corner. I did know that you and the men with you
were in all probability doomed. And--I did not think good to send a
rescue. You do not understand the game of war. You merely went in for it
for the sake of sport, I for the sake of the stakes. There is a
difference. More than that I do not mean to say."

He sat down opposite Derrick as he ended and began to smoke with an air
of indifference. But his eyes were on the boy's face. They had been
close friends for years.

Derrick still sat forward. He was staring at the ground heavily,
silently Carlyon had given him a shock. Somehow he had not expected from
him this cool acknowledgment of an action from which he himself shrank
with unspeakable abhorrence.

To leave a friend in the lurch was, in Derrick's eyes, an act so
infamous that he would have cut his own throat sooner than be guilty of
it. It did not occur to him that Carlyon might have urged extenuating
circumstances, but had rather scornfully abstained from doing so.

He did not even consider the fact that, as commanding-officer, Carlyon's
responsibility for the lives in his charge was a burden not to be
ignored or lightly borne. He did not consider the risk to these same
valuable lives that a rescue in force would have involved.

He saw only himself fighting for a forlorn hope, his grinning little
Goorkhas gallantly and intrepidly following wherever he would lead, and
he saw the awful darkness down which his feet had stumbled, a terrible
chasm that had yawned to engulf them all.

He sat up at last and looked straight at Carlyon. He spoke slowly, with
an effort.

"If it had been only myself," he said, "I--perhaps, I might have found
it easier. But there were the men, my men. You could not alter your
plans by one hair's-breadth to save their gallant lives. I can't get
over that. I never shall. You left us to die like rats in a hole. But
for a total stranger--a spy, a Secret Service man--we should have been
cut to pieces, every one of us. You did not, I suppose, send that man to
help us out?"

Carlyon blew a cloud of smoke upwards. He frowned a little, but his look
was more one of boredom than annoyance.

"What exactly are you talking about?" he said. "I don't employ spies. As
to Secret Service agents, I think you have heard my opinion of them
bef