He put his hand on Charles’s shoulder and said, “Charles—­Charles, my dear old boy, look up!  Think of Mary.  She has been wooed by more than one, but I think her heart is yours yet.”

“John,” said Charles, “that is what has made me hide from you all like this.  I know that she loved me above all men; and partly that she should forget a penniless and disgraced man like myself, and partly from a silly pride, I have spent all my cunning on losing myself, hoping that you would believe me dead.”

“We have hunted you hard, Charles.  You do not know, I suppose, that you are a rich man, and undoubtedly heir of Ravenshoe, though one link is still wanting.”

“What do you mean?”

“There is no reasonable doubt, although we cannot prove it, that your grandfather Peter was married previously to his marriage with Lady Alicia Staunton, that your father James was the real Ravenshoe, while poor Cuthbert and William—­”

“Cuthbert!  I will hide again.  I will never displace Cuthbert, mind you.”

“Cuthbert is dead.  He was drowned bathing last August.”

Charles broke down, and cried like a child.  When he was quiet, he asked after William.

“He is very well, as he deserves to be.  He gave up everything to hunt you through the world and bring you back.  Now, my dear old boy, do satisfy my curiosity.  What regiment did you enlist in?”

“In the 140th.”

He paused, hid his face in his hands, and then his speech became rapid and incoherent.

“At Devna we got wood-pigeons, and I rode the Roucan-nosed bay, and he carried me through it capitally.  I ask your pardon, sir, but I am only a poor discharged trooper.  I would not beg, sir, if I could help it, but pain and hunger are hard things to bear, sir!”

“Charles—­Charles!  Don’t you know me?”

“That is my name, sir.  That is what they used to call me.  I am no common beggar, sir.  I was a gentleman once, sir, and rode a-horseback.  I was in the light cavalry charge at Balaclava.  An angry business.  They shouldn’t get good fellows to fight together like that—­”

The next morning, old Lady Ascot, William, Mary, and John Marston were round his bed listening to his half-uttered, delirious babble.  The anxious question was put to the greatest of the doctors present.  “My dear Dr. B——­, will he die?”

“Well, yes,” said the doctor.  “I would sooner say ‘Yes’ than ’No’—­the chances are so heavy against him.  You must really prepare for the worst.”

IV.—­A Life-Long Shadow

Of course, he did not die—­I need not tell you that.  The doctors pulled him through.  And when he was better the doctors removed the splinters of bone from his arm.  He did not talk much in this happy quiet time.  William and Lady Ascot were with him all day.  William, dear fellow, used to sit on a footstool and read the “Times” to him.

Lord Welter (now Lord Ascot, on the death of his father) came to see Charles one day, and something he said made Charles ask if Adelaide was dead.