“Do you want anything?” he asked.

“Don’t you know me, Walter?” John said.

Walter started, and gazed at him earnestly.

“Good heavens!” he exclaimed at last.  “Why, it can’t be John!”

“It is what remains of me,” John replied, with a faint smile.

“Why, what on earth have you been doing to yourself, John?”

“I have been starving, in there,” John said, pointing to the city.

“Come into the tent, John,” Walter said, grasping his friend’s arm, and then letting it fall again, with an exclamation of horror at its thinness.  “You needn’t be afraid.  My father is out—­not that that would make any difference.”

John entered the tent, and sat exhausted upon a box.  Walter hastened to get some food, which he set before him, and poured out a large cup of wine and water, and then stood, looking on in awed silence, while John devoured his meal.

“I have wondered, a thousand times,” he said at last, when John had finished, “what you were doing in there, or whether you left before the siege began.  How did you get out?”

“I floated down the river to the mouth, beyond your lines, last night; and then worked round here.  I thought I might find you.”

“Well, I am glad indeed that you are out,” Walter said.  “Every time the mortar sent a shell into the town, I was thinking of you, and wishing that I could share meals with you, for, of course, we know that you are suffering horribly in the town.”

“Horribly!” John repeated.  “You can have no idea what it is, Walter, to see children suffer.  As for men, if it is the will of God, they must bear it, but it is awful for children.  I have had eighteen of them under my charge through the siege, and to see them getting thinner and weaker, every day, till the bones look as if they would come through the skin, and their eyes get bigger and bigger, and their voices weaker, is awful.  At last I could stand it no longer, and I have come out to fetch some food for them.”

“To fetch food!” Walter repeated.  “Do you mean to say you are thinking of going back again?”

“That I am,” John said.  “I am going to take some food in to them.  You will help me, won’t you, Walter?  It isn’t for the men that fight, but for little children, who know nothing about King James, or King William, or the Protestants, or the Catholics, but who are just God’s creatures, and are dying of hunger.  No one could grudge food to infants like these.”

“I will help you, of course, John,” Walter said, “if I can; but now, tell me all about it.”

John then gave an account of all he had been doing throughout the siege.

“And now what have you been doing, Walter?  Fighting?”