I was in the position of an executor according to the terms of a last will and testament.  Our comradeship in arms—­those of our old Army who survive will understand—­forbade refusal.  Besides, his intensity of purpose won my sympathy and admiration.  But I loved him none the more.  To my cripple’s detested sensitiveness, as he stood over me, he loomed more than ever the hulking brute.  His semi-confessions and innuendoes exacerbated my feelings of distrust and repulsion.  And yet, at the same tune, I could not—­nor did I try to—­repress an immense pity for the man; perhaps less for the man than for the soul in pain.  At the back of his words some torment burned at red heat, remorselessly.  He sought relief.  Perhaps he sought it from me because I was as apart as a woman from his physical splendour, a kind of bodiless creature with just a brain and a human heart, the ghost of an old soldier, far away from the sphere of poor passions and little jealousies.

I felt the tentacles of the man’s nature blindly and convulsively groping after something within me that eluded them.  That is the best way in which I can describe the psychology of these strange moments.  The morning sun streamed into my little oak-panelled dining-room and caught the silver and fruit on the breakfast table and made my frieze of old Delft glow blue like the responsive western sky.  With his back to the vivid window, Leonard Boyce stood cut out black like a silhouette.  That he, too, felt the tension, I know; for a wasp crawled over his face, from cheek-bone, across his temples, to his hair, and he did not notice it.

Instinctively I said the words:  “Your record.  Are you quite certain that I know it?”

With what intensity, with what significance in my eyes, I may have said them, I know not.  I repeat that I had a subconsciousness, almost uncanny, that we were souls rather than men, talking to each other.  He sat down once more, drawing the chair to the table and resting his elbow on it.

“My record,” said he.  “What about it?”

Again please understand that I felt I had the man’s soul naked before me.  An imponderable hand plucked away my garments of convention.

“Some time ago,” said I, “you spoke of my attitude towards you being marked by a certain reserve.  That is quite true.  It dates back many years.  It dates back from the South African War.  From an affair at Vilboek’s Farm.”

Again his lips twitched; but otherwise he did not move.

“I remember,” he answered.  “My men saw me run away.  I came out of it quite clean.”

I said:  “I saw the man afterwards in hospital at Cape Town.  His name was Somers.  He told me quite a different story.”

His face grew grey.  He glanced at me for a fraction of a second.  “What did he tell you?” he asked quietly.

In the fewest possible words I repeated what I have set down already in this book.  When I had ended, he said in the same toneless way: