Let that matter rest here. I shall remain a sergeant-major to the end—an enlisted man, a non-commissioned officer whose captain may send him back to the gun whenever it pleases him to do so, a man who must touch his cap to every officer he meets, a man subject to orders, a man ready for any work of war that may be given him to do. In view of the tedious slowness with which I am recovering from this wound, and the great need I know Captain Pollard has for an executive sergeant, I wrote to him, two weeks ago, resigning my place, and asking him to select some other capable man in my stead. He replied in his generous fashion, absolutely refusing to accept my resignation. That was Kilgariff’s modest way of putting the matter. What Pollard had actually written was this:— By your gallantry and your capacity as a hard-fighting soldier, you have won for my battery such honour and distinction as had not come to it from all its previous good conduct. Do you imagine that I am going to lose such a sergeant-major as you are, merely because his honourable wounds temporarily incapacitate him? I had thought to lose you by your richly earned promotion to a rank equal to my own, or superior to it. That promotion you have refused—foolishly, I think—but at any rate you have refused it. You are still my sergeant-major, therefore, and will remain that until you consent to accept a higher place. This was the situation so far as Kilgariff was concerned, as it revealed itself to Pollard and Arthur Brent. Dorothy knew another side of it. For with Dorothy, Kilgariff had quickly established relations of the utmost confidence and the truest friendship; and to Dorothy, Kilgariff revealed every thought, as he had never done to any other human being. Indeed, revelation was not necessary. Dorothy was a woman of that high type that loves sincerely and with courage, and Dorothy had seen the daily and hourly growing fascination of Kilgariff for Evelyn. She had seen Evelyn’s devoted ministry to him, and had understood the unconscious love that lay behind its childlike reserve. She had understood, as he had not, that, all unknown to herself, Evelyn had made of Kilgariff the hero of her adoration, and that Kilgariff’s soul had been completely enthralled by a devotion which did not recognise its own impulse or the fulness of its meaning. Dorothy knew far more, indeed, of the relations between these two than either of themselves had come to know. She was in no way unprepared, therefore, when one day Kilgariff said to her, as they two sat in converse:— “You know, of course, that I am deeply in love with Evelyn?” “Yes,” Dorothy answered; “I must be blind if I did not see that.” “Of course,” responded the man, “I have said nothing to her on the subject, and I shall say nothing, to the end. I speak to you of it only because I want your help in avoiding the danger-point. Evelyn is not in the least in love with me.” Dorothy made no response to that.