“I am no officer:  but I have been in many a battle, and I know the Russians well, and have seen how they fight; and there is many a brave man killed, and many a one more will be.”

“Oh, does it hurt them much?” asked one poor thing.

“Not often,” quoth Tom.

“Thank God, thank God!” and she turned suddenly away, and with the impulsive nature of her class, burst into violent sobbing and weeping.

Poor thing! perhaps among the men who fought and fell that day was he to whom she owed the curse of her young life; and after him her lonely heart went forth once more, faithful even in the lowest pit.

“You are strange creatures, women, women!” thought Tom:  “but I knew that many a year ago.  Now then—­the game is growing fast and furious, it seems.  Oh, that I may find myself soon in the thickest of it!”

So said Tom Thurnall; and so said Major Campbell, too, that night, as he prepared everything to start next morning to Southampton.  “The better the day, the better the deed,” quoth he.  “When a man is travelling to a better world, he need not be afraid of starting on a Sunday.”

CHAPTER XXV.

THE BANKER AND HIS DAUGHTER.

Tom and Elsley are safe at Whitbury at last; and Tom, ere he has seen his father, has packed Elsley safe away in lodgings with an old dame whom he can trust.  Then he asks his way to his father’s new abode; a small old-fashioned house, with low bay windows jutting out upon the narrow pavement.

Tom stops, and looks in the window.  His father is sitting close to it, in his arm-chair, his hands upon his knees, his face lifted to the sunlight, with chin slightly outstretched, and his pale eyes feeling for the light.  The expression would have been painful, but for its perfect sweetness and resignation.  His countenance is not, perhaps, a strong one; but its delicacy, and calm, and the high forehead, and the long white locks, are most venerable.  With a blind man’s exquisite sense, he feels Tom’s shadow fall on him, and starts, and calls him by name; for he has been expecting him, and thinking of nothing else all the morning, and takes for granted that it must be he.

In another moment Tom is at his father’s side.  What need to describe the sacred joy of those first few minutes, even if it were possible?  But unrestrained tenderness between man and man, rare as it is, and, as it were, unaccustomed to itself, has no passionate fluency, no metaphor or poetry, such as man pours out to woman, and woman again to man.  All its language lies in the tones, the looks, the little half-concealed gestures, hints which pass themselves off modestly in jest; and such was Tom’s first interview with his father; till the old Isaac, having felt Tom’s head and hands again and again, to be sure whether it were his very son or no, made him sit down by him, holding him still fast, and began—­