Before the evening was very far advanced he did tell her its history-- with reservations. She asked for it, a little diffidently, a little apologetically, but, as he felt, with an irresistible curiosity there was no subduing. "I want to know so badly," she said, colouring brightly. "I've wondered about it ever since I saw you first... You must think it very rude of me. ... Of course you've noticed me staring. It's abominable, but I can't help it. It's such a grim souvenir--and splendid too in its way. I've wanted to ask you about it a dozen times this evening, and I've been afraid of annoying you. And yet, why should curiosity annoy when it isn't unkind? ... I wish you'd tell me... Will you?" "Better curb your curiosity. You will be disillusioned otherwise," he replied. "It was about the most unromantic moment in my life when I received that." "Your life must have been very full of adventure," she answered with simple and unconscious flattery. He smiled grimly. "It hasn't lacked experience of sorts," he admitted. She looked up into his face, and her eyes were wonderfully soft, and big with admiration. He was tempted to stoop and kiss the fresh, young, slightly parted lips. He wondered whether she would resent it if he did. But the inclination that moved him to take the liberty was hardly strong enough to cause him to put it into effect. "Won't you let me judge?" she asked presently. "Judge what?" he said. He had forgotten for the moment the drift of the conversation; his mind was intent upon her. Then he saw her eyes fasten on the scar again, and, remembering her curiosity, laughed. "Oh, that! ... I was forgetting... There isn't much to tell, as a matter of fact. It represents one lurid moment, and then a blank... I received that slash over the jaw from one of my own Tommies--we were fighting on opposite sides at the time... The only satisfaction I got out of it was when later I learnt that the man next me had settled the reckoning for me." "Oh!" the girl whispered, and her soft eyes hardened. Behind the hardness there lurked conflicting emotions of pity and horror. Naked fact seemed so much grimmer, so much more significant of the hatred and the actuality of war than her heroic imagining. She had drawn for herself a splendid elaborated picture of dash and courage and the glory of battle, and in a few words he had blotted her picture from the canvas and set up in its place the rugged and brutal reality. But the reality, though it hurt, was far more impressive, than her carefully stage-managed adaptation. "He deserved death," she said. "How dastardly to attempt to kill his own officer! ... A deserter, too!" "No, not a deserter," he contradicted quietly. "But you said he was fighting on the opposite side!" She looked up at him suddenly. "Was it during the Boer war?" "Yes."