From the moment when Bones strode off after the painful discovery, had slammed the door of his hut and had steadfastly declined all manner of food and sustenance, he had voluntarily cut himself off from his kind. He met Hamilton on parade the following morning, hollow-eyed (as he hoped) after a sleepless night, and there was nothing in his attitude suggestive of the deepest respect and the profoundest regard for that paragraph of King's Regulations which imposes upon the junior officer a becoming attitude of humility in the presence of his superior officer. "How is your head, Bones?" asked Hamilton, after the parade had been dismissed. "Thank you, sir," said Bones bitterly--though why he should be bitter at the kindly inquiry only he knew--"thank you, sir, it is about the same. My temperature is--or was--up to one hundred and four, and I have been delirious. I wouldn't like to say, dear old--sir, that I'm not nearly delirious now." "Come up to tiffin," invited Hamilton. Bones saluted--a sure preliminary to a dramatic oration. "Sir," he said firmly, "you've always been a jolly old officer to me before this contretemps wrecked my young life--but I shall never be quite the same man again, sir." "Don't be an ass," begged Hamilton. "Revile me, sir," said Bones dismally; "give me a dangerous mission, one of those jolly old adventures where a feller takes his life in one hand, his revolver in the other, but don't ask me----" "My sister wants to see you," said Hamilton, cutting short the flow of eloquence. "Ha, ha!" laughed Bones hollowly, and strode into his hut. "And what I'm going to do with him, Heaven knows," groaned Hamilton at tiffin. "The fact is, Pat, your arrival on the scene has thoroughly demoralized him." The girl folded her serviette and walked to the window, and stood looking out over the yellow stretch of the deserted parade-ground. "I'm going to call on Bones," she said suddenly. "Poor Bones!" murmured Sanders. "That's very rude!" She took down her solar helmet from the peg behind the door and adjusted it carefully. Then she stepped through the open door, whistling cheerfully. "I hope you don't mind, sir," apologized Hamilton, "but we've never succeeded in stopping her habit of whistling." Sanders laughed. "It would be strange if she didn't whistle," he said cryptically. Bones was lying on his back, his hands behind his head. A half-emptied tin of biscuits, no less than the remnants of a box of chocolates, indicated that anchorite as he was determined to be, his austerity did not run in the direction of starvation.