balloon overhead, Berkley
could not see anything whatever even remotely connected with the
uproar which continued steadily in the west and south. Nobody
seemed to know whose troops were engaged, where they came from,
whither they were trying to force a fiery road through a land in
arms against their progress.

At times, to Berkley, it seemed as though every tree, every hill,
every thicket was watching him with sombre intent; as if Nature
herself were hostile, stealthy, sinister, screening terrors yet
unloosed, silently storing up violence in dim woods, aiding and
abetting ambush with all her clustering foliage; and that every
river, every swamp, every sunny vista concealed some hidden path to
death.

He stood rigid at his horse's head, lance in hand, dirty,
smoke-blackened, his ears deafened by the cannonade, his eyes cool
and alert, warily scanning hill and hollow and thicket.

Dead men of his regiment were borne past him; he glanced furtively
at them, not yet certain that the lower form of fear had left him,
not yet quite realising that he had blundered into manhood--that
for the first time in his life he was ready to take his chance with
life.

But, little by little, as the hours passed, there in the trodden
grass he began to understand something of the unformulated decision
that had been slowly growing in him--of the determination, taking
shape, to deal more nobly with himself--with this harmless self
which had accepted unworthiness and all its attributes, and which
riven pride would have flung back at the civilisation which branded
him as base.

It came--this knowledge--like a slowly increasing flare of light;
and at last he said under his breath, to himself:

"Nothing is unworthily born that is born of God's own law. I have
been what I chose. I can be what I will."

A gracious phantom grew under his eyes taking exquisite shape
before him; and dim-eyed, he stared at it till it dwindled, faded,
dissolved into empty air and sunshine.

No; he could never marry without revealing what he was; and that he
would never do because of loyalty to that tender ghost which he
must shield for ever even as he would have shielded her in life.

No living soul had any right to know. No love of his for any woman
could ever justify betrayal of what alone concerned the dead.

The shells, which, short fused, had been bursting high above the
swamp to the right, suddenly began to fall nearer the cavalry, and
after a