Yet he had made two attempts to escape. In the first he ran away with two comrades as far as Mezieres. Being pursued by the _gens-d'armes_ there, and called upon to surrender, his companions had given themselves up. Not so our hero; nor was he secured until he lay unconscious with a bullet-hole in the cheek. It was this which ever afterwards affected his speech, the bullet having cut or partially paralysed some string of the tongue. It had been touch-and-go with him; but he recovered, and, passing henceforward as a desperate character, was drafted south with a dozen other desperate characters to the gloomy fortress of Briancon. There, in a second attempt for liberty, a fall from the ramparts had cost him his leg. But worse than all his incarceration had been the final tramp through France--right away north to Valenciennes; then left-about-turn, three hundred and fifty miles to Tours; then south-east to Riou; and from Riou south-west to Bordeaux, where the transport took him off--one of six transports for about fifteen hundred released prisoners. All the way, too, on a wooden leg! Heaven knows how bitterly he had come to hate that leg. Yet his heart, hardened though it was by all this long adversity, had melted as the _Romney_ transport beat up closer and closer for England, and at sight of Plymouth heights he had broken into tears. Troy! Troy! After all, Troy would remember him. Though he knew it brought him nearer to freedom, all that marching through France had been a weariness eating into his soul. Now a free man, along the road from Plymouth to Troy he had almost skipped. And this had been his homecoming! They remembered him. Beyond all his hopes they remembered him. In their memory he had grown into a Homeric man, a demi-god. He had only to declare himself. . . . The Major lay on his hospital bed and stared at the ceiling. It was all very well, but ten years had made a difference--a mighty difference; a difference which beat all his calculations. It was a double difference, too; for all the while that he had been shrinking in self-knowledge, his reputation at home had been expanding like a cucumber. Good Lord! How could he live up to it now? To obey his impulses and declare himself was simple enough, perhaps; but afterwards-- He had nearly betrayed himself when Cai Tamblyn--in a queer straight-cut frock-coat of livery, blue with brass buttons, but otherwise looking much the same as ever--thrust his head in at the door. In the first shock of astonishment the Major had almost cried out on him by name. "Why--eh?--what are _you_ doing here?" he stammered. Hitherto he had been waited on by a strange doctor (Hansombody's new partner) and a nurse whom he had assisted twelve years ago, when she was left a widow, to set up as a midwife.