Mallett went over to the bedside, and looked at the wounded man. His face was drawn and pinched, his eyes sunken in his head, his face deadly pale, and his hair matted with perspiration. "Do you know me, Captain Mallett?" "No, lad, I cannot say that I do, though when the doctor told me your name it seemed familiar to me. Very likely I should have recognised you if I had met you a week since, but, you see, we are both altered a good deal from the effect of our wounds." "I am the son of Farmer Lechmere, your tenant." "Good heavens! man. You don't mean to say you are Lechmere's eldest son, George! What in the world brought you to this?" "You did," the man said, sternly. "Your villainy brought me here." Frank Mallett gave a start of astonishment that cost him so violent a twinge in his wound that he almost cried out with sudden pain. "What wild idea have you got into your head, my poor fellow?" he said soothingly. "I am conscious of having done no wrong to you or yours. I saw your father and mother on the afternoon before I came away. They made no complaint of anything." "No, they were contented enough. Do you know, Captain Mallett, that I loved Martha Bennett?" "No. I have been so little at home of recent years that I know very little of the private affairs of my tenants, but I remember her, of course, and I was grieved to learn by a letter from Sir John Greendale the other day that in some strange way she was missing." "Who knew that better than yourself?" the man said, raising himself on his elbow, and fixing a look of such deadly hatred upon Mallett, that the latter involuntarily drew back a step. "I saw you laughing and talking to her in front of her father's house. I heard you with her in their garden the evening before you left and she disappeared, and it was my voice you heard in the lane. Had I known that you were going that night, I would have followed you and killed you, and saved her. The next morning you were both gone. I waited a time and then went to the depot of your regiment and enlisted. I had failed to save her, but at least I could avenge her. That bullet was mine, and had you not stumbled over a Pandy's body, I suppose, just as I pulled my trigger, you would have been a dead man. "I did not know that I had failed, and, rushing forward with my company, was in the thickest of the fight. I wanted to be killed, but no shot struck me, and at last, when chasing a Pandy along a passage in the Kaiser Bagh, he turned and levelled his piece at me. Mine was loaded, and I could have shot him down as he turned, but I stood and let him have his shot. When I found myself here I was sorry that he had not finished me at once, but when I heard that you were alive, and likely to recover, I thanked him in my heart that he had left me a few more days of life, that I could let you know that it was I who had fired, and that Martha's wrong had not been wholly unavenged."