The ‘old chap’ winked. He had no strength to express himself in any more emphatic manner; but he had got to love his father once again, for, after all, the ties of blood are strong, and a man may have been a wrong doer without giving his own son an eternal cause to hate him. And when a man has a bullet hole through the neck, and has been unconscious for many days, and delirious for many weeks, and finds a once familiar face bending over him, habit asserts itself; and any hatred or despite which may have come in between two people long ago is likely to be scattered. It was a foreign air which howled about the gables and chimneys. It was a foreign wind which wept and moaned about that abode of sorrow, and drove the rain against the window panes. But to the boy, the feel of whose father’s hand was still warm in his own, it was home, home, home. The candle dwindled down, and he had been watchful enough to prevent the whole place being set on fire by waiting to blow out its final flame as it drove towards the bare wood on which it rested. Darkness came down and slumber with it; and then on the top of slumber a quiet whisper and a dawning light which waked many men in the long bare corridor. There was a candle carried by a hospital nurse in the sombre uniform of her craft, and behind it came a lady whom every waking man there present turned to thank, if it were only by a movement of the enfeebled hand, or a droop of the eyelid, or a motion of the deadened lips. Men who are dying after long sickness in hospital cannot cheer. Men who fall in the full tide of the strength of manhood on the battlefield can acclaim their leader. The wasted forces had naturally gone, but as the gleaming candle light led Florence Nightingale from couch to couch, the wakers turned and gave such signals as they could. The pitying, watchful, gracious face went by, and the candle light departed. A good many weeks and months went by before the name of the owner of that gracious face and that memorable smile was known even to the parting souls and suffering bodies which were cheered by it. Spring comes up earlier in the region of Scutari than it does in London, and there were many scores of ragged silken-bearded fellows rambling up and down the streets of the place on crutches before the first leaf had declared itself in any park in London, and almost before the first wayside flower had bloomed in any English country hedgerow.