find him as she did from time to time, to make sure he was comfortable, smiled, hearing it, and asked: "What is it, Farvie?" He looked up into her kind face as if it were strange to him. At that moment he and life were having it out together. Even womanly sweetness could not come between. "Anne," said he, "I'm an old man." "Oh, no, Farvie!" She was smoothing his shoulder with her slender hand. "No!" But even she could not deny it. To her youth, he knew, he must seem old. Yet her service, her fostering love, had only made him older. She had copied his own attitude. She had helped him not to die, and yet to sink into the ambling pace of these defended years. "Damn it, Anne!" he said, with suddenly frowning brow, and now she started. She had never heard an outbreak from courtly Farvie. "I wish I'd been more of a man." She did not understand him, and her eyes questioned whether he was ill. He read the query. That was it, he thought impotently. They had all three of them been possessed by that, the fear that he was going to be ill. "Yes," he said, "I wish I'd been more of a man. I should be more of a man now." She slipped away out of the room. He thought he had frightened her. But in a moment she was back with some whiskey, hot, in a glass. The colonel wanted to order her off and swear his nerves would be as taut without it. But how could he? There was the same traitorous trembling in his legs, and he put out his hand and took the glass, and thanked her. The thanks sounded like the courteous, kind father she knew; but when she had carried the glass into the kitchen she stood a moment, her hand on the table, and thought, the lines of trouble on her forehead: what had been the matter with him?