with much triumph. He got conceited afterwards and slept on my bed till
kicked off by Ben Abdi. I see it's Sunday. Church four hundred odd miles
away."

This, my masters, is not the stuff to quote _in extenso_, and yet in its
day this diary was cried over--before it was put away in the jewel
drawer. Truly women are strange--one can never tell how a thing will
present itself to them. Honest Jem Agar, nibbling his penholder and
jerking these lucid observations out of his military brain by mere force
of discipline, never suspected the heart that was in it all--that minute
particle of himself that lay in the blot in the corner carefully absorbed
by the exhausted blotting-paper.

"Sunday, egad!" he muttered, leaning his arms on the cunning table, and
gazing out across the pine-clad valley that lay below him in a deep blue
haze.

He stared into the haze, and there he saw those whom he called "his
people" walking across a neat English park toward a peaceful little
English church. To them came presently a young person; a young person
clad in pink cotton, who walked with a certain demure sureness of tread,
as if she knew her own mind and other things besides. Her path came into
the park from the left, and among the trees into which it disappeared
behind her there stood the red chimneys of a long low house.

Suddenly these visions vanished before something more tangible in the
haze of the valley. This was the flutter of a dirty white rag which
seemed to come and go among the fir trees.

Jem Agar rose from his temporary seat and walked to the door of the