"What _has_ money in it? That's what I want to know?" "What is that to you? You don't want money." "Oh, don't I just! When I tell you I'm stone-broke." "With you it's chronic. No, you don't want money. What you want is sense." "Anything else?" "Just a trifle of self-control, a smattering of principle, manliness--h'm--_honour_!" "Thanks, awfully. Have one of these?" His face crimsoned, darkened, and set in a sullen ferocity. The elder man smiled behind his beard, glad to have touched some harder stuff under the facile sweetness. "Yes, young one, that's the right word," he repeated. The boy got up, very pale, thanked him for the luncheon, and said that he had to go. The man rose, too, put some silver on the table, and followed him into the sunny street. There they walked silently side by side till they reached the outskirts of the village, behind the Roman tower, where the turf was broken by grey boulders and dotted with thorn and bramble-bushes, and the air was sharp even in the brilliant sun. "Very English," the elder man said, pointing to the turf; but the young one was silent still, and his friend saw that he was fighting to keep back tears. "Just look at those soldiers," he added, when their road crossed another, quite open, but labelled _défense militaire_, where some men in shabby uniforms and dented _képis_ were strolling. "Did they come out of a second-hand clothes shop?" "They don't walk; they shamble," the young man replied, roused to look at them with a critical eye, and thinking of the smart, well-set-up fellows under his own command with a home-sick pang. "What should you give yours for that, eh?" "It isn't so much your English, as your slang, that I wonder at, de Konski. Where on earth did you get it?" the young man asked. "In England probably. Yes, I have spent some time in England. Do you know, Paul, I used to see a good deal of your mother at one time, and I have never lost touch with her." "Ah, _she_ didn't teach you slang," he reflected, wondering if the man had been an old flame of his mother's. That he was for some good reason passing under an assumed name he knew; that he was on intimate terms with people of his acquaintance, and conversant with all his family affairs, he was well aware, else he knew only that the man had befriended and helped him as a friend of his cousin's. "And I know more about her now than you do, perhaps, for I know what is breaking her heart," the elder man added. "Oh, hearts don't break so easily. But I know what will cut her up awfully when she hears it," the youth said, jamming his hat sullenly over his eyes. "But--well, my sisters will look after her. They'll make her happy. As for me--well, it must be the ranks, or the Colonies--or the first opportunity of being washed overboard--taken with cramp, swimming. No other way. I did think of the sea--or a shot--this morning. But--she mustn't think it's on purpose. She----"