came to a head.  Certain Englishmen discharged from the French war-prisons were landed at Plymouth.  The town turned out to welcome the poor fellows home, and the Mayor entertained them at a banquet, to which also he invited some two hundred townsmen.  Among the guests he was good enough to include me; for it has been a consolation to me, ladies, and a source of pride, that my friends in Falmouth have not withdrawn in adversity the respect which in old days my uniform commanded.”

“Captain Branscome is not telling you the half of it,” I broke in eagerly.  “Every one in Falmouth knows him to be a hero.  Why, he has a sword of honour at home, given him for one of the bravest battles ever fought!”

“Gently, boy—­gently!” Captain Branscome corrected me, with a smile, albeit a sad one.  “Youth is generous, ladies; it sees these things through a haze which colours and magnifies them, and—­and it’s a very poor kind of hero you’ll consider me before I have done.  Where was I?  Ah, yes, to be sure—­the banquet.  His Worship can little have guessed what his invitation meant to me, or that, while others thanked him for a compliment, to me it offered a satisfying meal such as I had not eaten for months.  Mr. Stimcoe had given the school a holiday.  In short, I attended.

“I fear, ladies, that the food and the generous wine together must have turned my head—­there is no other explanation; for when the meal was over and I sat listening to the speeches, but fumbling with a glass of port before me, scarcely with the half-crown in my pocket which must carry me over another week’s house-keeping, all of a sudden the man inside me rose in revolt.  I felt such poverty as mine to be unendurable, and that I was a slave, a spiritless fool, to put up with it.  There must be hundreds of good, Christian folk in the world who had only to know to stretch out a hand of help and gladly, as I would have helped such a case in the days of my own prosperity.  Remember, I am not putting this forward as a sober plea.  I know it now to be false, self-cheating, the apology that every beggar makes for himself, the specious argument that every poor man must resist who would hold fast by his manhood.  But there, with the wine in me and the juices of good meat, the temptation took me at unawares and mastered me as I had never allowed it to master me while I hungered.  I saw the world in a sudden rosy light; I felt that my past sufferings had been unnecessary.  I thought of Major Brooks—­”

“Bless the man!” interjected Miss Belcher.  “He’s coming to the point at last.”

“Your pardon, ma’am.  I will be briefer.  I thought of Major Brooks.  I took a resolve there and then to extend my holiday; to walk hither to Minden Cottage, and lay my case before him.  The banquet had no sooner broken up than I started.  I reached Truro at nightfall, and hired a bed there for sixpence.  Early next morning I set forward again.  By this time the impulse had died out