“Poor Bill’s things came back this morning--his watch and his cigar-case, and mother’s photograph--and with them, I think, but of course father did not show that to me, a letter from the fellow whom Bill picked up on his own horse, and brought out from the Boer fire when he himself was mortally wounded.” There is an unresenting pain running through the whole of this narrative, but Lavinia does not notice it. “Does the letter give any more details--say whether he suffered much?” she asks, in white eagerness. “Oh, but I forgot,” half impatiently, “you did not see it!” “He will show it to you,” replies the young man, as if stating a perfectly natural and accountable fact. After a pause, while they both trudge on in hushed emotion-- “Poor old fellow! if he knew how much I understood what it must be to him to see me there, who am the embodiment of everything that he despises and dislikes, eating my luncheon, well and fit, while Bill is lying in his wretched makeshift of a South African grave, he would perhaps hate me a little less than he does.” The girl turns to him now impulsively, her fine lucid eyes shining wetly in the semi-darkness. “And if he could but look into your heart--oh, why haven’t we windows in our breasts? how much fewer mistakes there would be if we had!--he would see how gladly, _gladly_ you would change places with Bill!” The appeal is not answered. Campion’s head is sunk on his breast. “You would, wouldn’t you?” she cries urgently, as if she could not bear a moment’s delay in the assent to a proposition so obvious. There is an instant’s pause; then her companion--they have both stopped--lifts his eyes with obvious difficulty to hers. “No,” he says, in a low but not uncertain voice, while the moon, which has just looked over a clump of neighbouring hornbeams, lights the sincerity of his quivering face, “I would _not_ rather change places with Bill. I would rather be alive here, walking with you, than lying cold and bloody under that hideous veldt. I have never had any opinion of what is conventionally called _honour_. ‘Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday.’ Well, I have no wish to have died o’ Wednesday.” For a moment a look of terror and aversion crosses Lavinia’s face; then her brow grows clear. “It is lucky for you that I do not believe you,” she says, with a sort of laugh--“that I know your ways.” “Do you?” he answers, half under his breath; and again they walk on. They are outside the Park gates, have followed the road that leads past the King’s Woods, and have reached the brow of the hill, half-way down which the village lights show their yellow points, and the church steeple tells its jackdaws, now silent in bed, to the tune of “The Last Rose of Summer,” that it is seven o’clock. Upon the silvering sky the Kentish oast-houses draw their extinguisher outline.