Bip, who regarded Dale with mysterious interest, made farther advances. He went up close, and looked wonderingly into his face; but at last both he and the old woman left unseen and unheard. All unconscious of his surroundings, this student was living in other days with the dauntless Pompey. By the aid of the huge dictionary, now seldom opened, he laboriously followed this daring friend of the great Cicero. Since morning he had witnessed the capture of a thousand cities, the slaying or subjugation of a million human beings--and more of this was to come. Had lightning snapped about his head he would not have known it for the wilder sounds of battlefields, scattered between Rome and the Euphrates, possessing his brain. When Jane arrived, Mac was properly introduced to the old gentleman, who made a great fuss over him and directed her attention to his points of unusual excellence. But Brent, he told her, was not about. "Dale would like to see him," she said enthusiastically. "Oh, yes," his face clouded, "I suppose so!" "What's the matter?" she quickly asked. "Matter?" he looked up. "Why, nothing, my dear! Nothing, of course!" But it did not satisfy, and she asked again: "Has anything happened?--Dale, or anything?" He must have found some difficulty in evading this direct question, and his hesitation, brief though it was, alarmed her. "No, my dear. I cannot say that anything has happened. I may be growing a little uncertain of him--that is, I may be afraid--oh, bother! It is nothing but an old man's fancy!" Nevertheless, when later, calling the mountaineer's name, she stepped through the library window, an element of uncertainty, quite a different sort from that which the Colonel was congratulating himself upon having so deftly hid, filled her heart with a vague foreboding. Dale was mumbling aloud as he read, and did not hear her; but a slight pressure on his shoulder brought him slowly back from scenes of carnage, and he looked up into her face, smiling down at him. "Stop awhile, and speak to Mac! Your eyes seem tired!" "They're not. That was a great man--that Pompey!" "Great," she agreed, a trifle piqued that he ignored her dog. "Those fights," he said tensely, "were the biggest things a feller ever did!" "He did something bigger than conquering men," she told him. "What?" he challenged. "The battles won over himself," she answered slowly. "His upright life, his unsullied honor toward all those women whom he made captive. In battles of that kind there are great generals today. In that respect everyone can be a Pompey. I wish I could feel," she thought again of the Colonel's troubled face, "that you, without any doubt at all, were going to be one!"