strained, quivering look, his pallour increased, his dark, wide-opened
eyes seemed preternaturally large.

The stories were all of that terrible winter in the Crimea, now ten
years past, and a fresh story was always in the telling before its
predecessor was ended. For each of the four men had borne his share
of that winter's wounds and privations. It was still a reality rather
than a memory to them; they could feel, even in this hot summer
evening and round this dinner-table, the chill of its snows, and the
pinch of famine. Yet their recollections were not all of hardships.
The Major told how the subalterns, of whom he had then been one, had
cheerily played cards in the trenches three hundred yards from the
Malakoff. One of the party was always told off to watch for shells
from the fort's guns. If a black speck was seen in the midst of the
cannon smoke, then the sentinel shouted, and a rush was made for
safety, for the shell was coming their way. At night the burning fuse
could be seen like a rocket in the air; so long as it span and flew,
the card-players were safe, but the moment it became stationary above
their heads it was time to run, for the shell was falling upon them.
The guns of the Malakoff were not the rifled guns of a later decade.
When the Major had finished, the General again looked at the clock,
and Geoffrey said good-night.

He stood outside the door listening to the muffled talk on the other
side of the panels, and, with a shiver, lighted his candle, and held it
aloft in the dark and silent hall. There was not one man's portrait upon
the walls which did not glow with the colours of a uniform,--and there
were the portraits of many men. Father and son the Faversham's had been
soldiers from the very birth of the family. Father and son,--no
steinkirks and plumed hats, no shakos and swallow tails, no frogged