Sick men who have been half-starved for a year or two, and who have run through every note of the gamut of emotion, may be quicker to appreciate these influences than common people are: but Polson Jervase, lying on his back and staring upwards in a futile endeavour to trace the semi-circular ring of smoke upon the ceiling, felt them all deeply. Whilst he lay there, staring upwards, there was a sudden patter of bare feet on the bare floor at his side, and a hand clutched him. ‘Look here,’ said Major de Blacquaire, and even in his half dream he knew the voice instantly, as if he had been wide awake and the room had lain in broad daylight. ‘Look here, what the devil did you do it for?’ ‘Get back into bed,’ said Polson, ‘and I’ll try to talk to you.’ The beds were not more than twenty inches in width, and there was barely a foot between them, so that a man by the stretching of a hand could touch a comrade. Out of the dark, to the Sergeant’s intense surprise, there came a groping hand, which sought his own, and found it and Clutched it. ‘What the devil did you do it for?’ said De Blacquaire. ‘Well,’ said the wounded Sergeant, ‘it’s pretty hard to say. I suppose it’s a mixed-up kind of thing altogether. I saw you drop, and you promised to break me in the morning, and if I’d let your chance go by, d’ye see----’ ‘See! ‘said De Blacquaire, holding on to the hand in the darkness. ‘You’re not half a bad fellow, Jervase.’ ‘Ain’t I?’ said Jervase. ‘You go on like this, Major, and I shall begin to think that you’re a better sort than I fancied you were.’ The two men went to sleep together, each holding the other’s hand. It was an odd thing, and quite unlikely to have been prophesied by anybody; but it happened. An hour or two later, when the elder Jervase stole in on tiptoe, with a new cup of priceless beef-tea, he saw the two men lying there, with their faces turned to each other, as if they had been lovers, and hand holding hand. He took Polson by the wrist, and shook the grasp gently asunder. ‘You’ve got to take this, old chap,’ he said, and setting down the candle he carried, and fixing it by its own grease to the rough hospital table at the bed head, he began to feed the boy once more. You are not to imagine the ward silent all this time. There are valiant souls of men passing with every hour, and groans of death and anguish, and all the living axe conscious. When Jervase had fed the Sergeant to the last teaspoonful, he retired again, leaving the candle burning on the table at the bed head. ‘These poor chaps,’ he said, ‘may find a little bit of comfort in a light, and any way, good English wax don’t stink like Turkish lamp oil, does it, old chap?’