In the office next door the Sergeant-Major was speaking soft words to the Pay Corporal. "Blimey, I dunno what's come over the bloke. You know that there Meyrick..." "Who, the Slug?" interpolated the other. "Yes. Well 'e come shambling on to parade this morning with 'is puttees flapping round his ankles--late as usual; and 'e told me to run 'im up to office." A thumb indicated the Major next door. "When I gets 'im there, instead of giving 'im three days C.B. and being done with it, 'e starts a lot of jaw about motives and discipline. 'E hadn't got no ruddy excuse; said 'e was a'reading Kipling, or some such rot--when 'e ought to have been 'elping the cook's mate." "What did he give him?" asked the Pay Corporal, interested. "Nothing. His blessing and dismissed the case. As if I had nothing better to do than listen to 'im talking 'ot air to a perisher like that there Meyrick. 'Ere, pass over them musketry returns." Which conversation, had Seymour overheard it, he would have understood and fully sympathised with. For C.-S.-M. Hayton, though a prince of sergeant-majors, was no student of physiology. To him a spade was a spade only as long as it shovelled earth. * * * * * Now, before I go on to the day when the subject of all this trouble and talk was called on to make good, and how he did it, a few words on the man himself might not be amiss. War, the great forcing house of character, admits no lies. Sooner or later it finds out a man, and he stands in the pitiless glare of truth for what he is. And it is not by any means the cheery hail-fellow-well-met type, or the thruster, or the sportsman, who always pool the most votes when the judging starts....