It was nothing.  It was only as if one were to have twenty teeth pulled out at once.  The pain was over in an instant.  His left arm seemed nearly dead, but he could hold his reins in a way.  He saw Hornby before him, and his own friends were beside him again, and there was a rally and a charge.  At guns?  No.  At men this time—­Russian hussars—­right valiant fellows, too.  He could do but little himself.  He rode at a Russian, and unhorsed him; he remembers seeing the man go down.  They beat them back, and then turned and rode—­for it was time.

As the noise of the battle grew fainter behind them, he looked around to see who was riding beside him and holding him by the right arm.  It was the little cornet.  Charles wondered why he did so.

“You’re hard hit, Simpson,” said the cornet.  “Never mind.  Keep your saddle a little longer.  We shall be all right directly.”

Charles looked down, and noticed that his left arm was hanging numbed by his side, and that a trooper was guiding his horse.

Soon they were among English faces, and English cheers rang out in welcome to their return, but it was nothing to him; he kept his eye, which was growing dim, on Hornby, and when he saw him fall off his saddle into the arms of a trooper, he dismounted, too, and staggered towards him.

The world seemed to go round and round, and he felt about him like a blind man.  But he found Hornby somehow.  Presently a doctor was bending over him.

Later, they found Hornby dead and cold, with his head on Charles’s lap.  Charles had been struck by a ball in the bone of his arm, and the splinters were driven into the flesh, though the arm was not broken.  It was a nasty business, said the doctors.  All sorts of things might happen to him.  Only one thing was certain, and that was that Charles Ravenshoe’s career in the army was over for ever.

At home they all believed him dead, for William had traced him to Varna, and there had been informed that his foster-brother had died of cholera.  The change of name was partly responsible for this, for among the dead or living there was no signs of Charles Ravenshoe.

But he recovered, after a long spell in the hospital at Scutari, and after a time was sent home to Fort Pitt.  But that mighty left arm, which had done such noble work when it belonged to No. 3 in the Oxford University Eight, was useless; and Charles Simpson, trooper of the 140th, was discharged from the army, and found himself on Christmas Eve in the street with eighteen shillings and ninepence in his pocket, wondering blindly what the end would be, but no more dreaming of begging from those who had known him formerly than of leaping off Waterloo Bridge.

III.—­The Last Eighteen Shillings

Charles’s luck seemed certainly to have deserted him at last.  He had got to spend his Christmas with eighteen shillings and a crippled left arm, and had nothing left to trust to but his little friend, the cornet, who had come home invalided, and was living with his mother in Hyde Park Gardens.