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“You are really getting quite well?” he asked.

“Yes, I think so.” Then, after a pause and with a glance from the violet eyes, “Are you glad?”

“You know I am glad. You know that if you had–died, I should have died too.”

“Nonsense,” said the curved lips, but they trembled and the violet eyes were a-swim with tears. Then a little catch of the throat, and, almost in a whisper, “Anthony, father told me about you and the window-blind and–oh! I don’t know how to thank you. But I want to say something, if you won’t laugh. Just at that time I seemed to come up out of some blackness and began to dream of you. I dreamed that I was sinking back into the blackness, but you caught me by the hand and lifted me quite out of it. Then we floated away together for ever and for ever and for ever, for though sometimes I lost you we always met again. Then I woke up and knew that I wasn’t going to die, that’s all.”

“What a beautiful dream,” began Anthony, but at that moment, pausing from her labours at the beef, Mrs. Walrond said:

“Barbara, eat your duck before it grows cold. You know the doctor said you must take plenty of nourishment.”

“I am going to, mother,” answered Barbara, “I feel dreadfully hungry,” and really she did; her gentle heart having fed full, of a sudden her body seemed to need no nourishment.

“Dear me!” said Mr. Walrond, pausing from his labours and viewing the remains of the duck disconsolately, for he did not see what portion of its gaunt skeleton was going to furnish him with dinner, and duck was one of his weaknesses, “dear me, there’s a dreadful smell of burning in this room. Do you think it can be the beef, my love?”

“Of course it is not the beef,” replied Mrs. Walrond rather sharply. “The beef is beautifully done.”

“Oh!” ejaculated one of the girls who had got the calcined bit, “why, mother, you said it was burnt yourself.”

“Never mind what I said,” replied Mrs. Walrond severely, “especially as I was mistaken. It is very rude of your father to make remarks about the meat.”

“Well, something is burning, my love.”

Janey, who was sitting next to Anthony, paused from her meal to sniff, then exclaimed in a voice of delight:

“Oh! it is Anthony’s coat tails. Just look, they are turning quite brown. Why, Anthony, you must be as beautifully done as the beef. If you can sit there and say nothing, you are a Christian martyr wasted, that’s all.”

Anthony sprang up, murmuring that he thought there was something wrong behind, which on examination there proved to be. The end of it was that the chairs were all pushed downwards, with the result that for the rest of that meal there was a fiery gulf fixed between him and Barbara which made further confidences impossible. So he had to talk of other matters. Of these, as it chanced, he had something to say.

A letter had arrived that morning from his elder brother George, who was an officer in a line regiment. It had been written in the trenches before Sebastopol, for these events took place in the mid-Victorian period towards the end of the Crimean War. Or rather the letter had been begun in the trenches and finished in the military hospital, whither George had been conveyed, suffering from “fever and severe chill,” which seemed to be somewhat contradictory terms, though doubtless they were in fact compatible enough. Still he wrote a very interesting letter, which, after the pudding had been consumed to the last spoonful, Anthony read aloud while the girls ate apples and cracked nuts with their teeth.

“Dear me! George seems to be very unwell,” said Mrs. Walrond.

“Yes,” answered Anthony, “I am afraid he is. One of the medical officers whom my father knows, who is working in that hospital, says they mean to send him home as soon as he can bear the journey, though he doesn’t think it will be just at present.”