"But what can you do?" I said excitedly, for my brain was in a turmoil. I loved him, but his conduct frightened me; it was so unlike anything I could have expected from a gallant soldier; and there was a singularly cold sensation of dread creeping over me. I felt afraid that I was going to dislike him as one unworthy to be known, as I cried angrily, "But what can you do?" He looked at me as if he could read me through and through, and his face grew very sad as he replied-- "There is the proper course open to me, Vincent, and that I am about to do." "Fight him?" I cried eagerly, and the miserable sensation of dread began to pass off. "No, boy; I am going to explain everything to Major Lacey, who will report to head-quarters if he considers it right." He passed slowly out of the room, and I heard his step echoing beneath the broad verandah, as he went in the direction of Major Lacey's, while, unable to restrain myself in my bitterness and contempt, I too got up and hurried out. "He is a coward!" I muttered; "a coward!"--for I could not see the bravery of the man's self-control; "and I have been gradually growing to like him, and think of him always as being patient and manly and noble. Why, I would have tried to knock Barton down, if he had killed me for it." "Gone to report," I thought again, after a pause; "gone to tell, like a little schoolboy who has been pushed down. Him a soldier; and a coward like that!" CHAPTER ELEVEN. Joined to the love of a military life, I had all a boy's ideal notions of bravery and chivalry. By which I mean the frank, natural, outside ideas, full of the show and glitter, and I could not see beneath the surface. I did not know then that it might take more courage to refuse to fight and face the looks and scorn of some people than to go and meet an adversary in the field, after the braggart fashion of some of our French neighbours, whose grand idea of honour is to go out early some morning to meet an enemy about some petty, contemptible quarrel, fence for a few moments till one or the other is pricked or scratched, and then cry, "_Ah, mon ami! mon ami_!" embrace, and go home to breakfast together. Very beautiful, no doubt, to a certain class of Frenchman, but to a nineteenth-century Englishman--fluff. I'm afraid that I was very Gallic in my ideas in more ways, so that when next morning I knew that both Brace and Barton had had long interviews separately with Major Lacey, and then met him together in the presence of the doctor, and found that a peace had been patched up, my feelings toward Brace were very much cooled, and I was ready to become fast friends with Barton--at least, I could have been if he had been a different kind of man. As it was, I was thrown a great deal on the society of the doctor and the other officers, while Brace, who rightly interpreted my coolness, held himself aloof at mess.