"I should have known you now, Lechmere," he said, as he came to his
bedside. "Of course you are still greatly changed, but you are
getting back your old expression, and I hope that in the course of
two or three months you will be able to take your place in the
ranks again."

"I don't know, sir. I ain't fit to stay with the regiment, and have
thought of being invalided home and then buying my discharge. I
know you have said nothing as to how you got that wound, not even
to the doctor; for if you had done so there is not a man in
hospital who would have spoken to me. But how could I join the
regiment again? knowing that if there was any suspicion of what I
had done, every man would draw away from me, and that there would
be nothing for me to do but to put a bullet in my head."

"But no one ever will know it. It was a mad act, and I believe you
were partly mad at the time."

"I think so myself now that I look back. I think now that I must
have been mad all along. It never once entered my mind to doubt
that it was you, and now I see plainly enough that except what the
man said about going away--and anyone might have said that--there
was not a shadow of ground or suspicion against you. But even if I
had never had that suspicion I should have left home.

"Why, sir, I know that my own father and mother suspected that I
killed her. I resented it at the time. I felt hard and bitter
against it, but as I have been lying here I have come to see that I
brought their suspicions upon myself by my own conduct, and that