He stepped back into the room with a feeling of nausea, and blowing out the candles sat down alone, in the twilight, amongst the empty chairs.  There were dark corners in the room; the broadening light searched into them, and suddenly the air was tinged with warm gold.  Somewhere the sun had risen.  In a little, Scrope heard a dropping sound of firing, and a few moments afterwards the rattle of a volley.  The battle was joined.  Scrope saw the trench again yawn up before his eyes.  The Major was right.  This morning, again, Lieutenant Scrope had the harder part of it.

THE MAN OF WHEELS.

When Sir Charles Fosbrook was told by Mr. Pepys that Tangier had been surrendered to the Moors, he asked at once after the fate of his gigantic mole; and when he was informed that his mole had been, before the evacuation, so utterly blown to pieces that its scattered blocks made the harbour impossible for anchorage, he forbade so much as the mention in his presence of the name of Africa.  But if he had done with Tangier, Tangier had not done with him, and five years afterwards he became concerned in the most unexpected way with certain tragic consequences of that desperate siege.

He received a letter from an acquaintance of whom he had long lost sight, a Mr. Mardale of the Quarry House near Leamington, imploring him to give his opinion upon some new inventions.  The value of the inventions could be easily gauged; Mr. Mardale claimed to have invented a wheel of perpetual rotation.  Sir Charles, however, had his impulses of kindness.  He knew Mr. Mardale to be an old and gentle person, a little touched in the head perhaps, who with money enough to surfeit every instinct of pleasure, had preferred to live a shy secluded life, busily engaged either in the collection of curiosities or the invention of toy-like futile machines.  There was a girl too whom Sir Charles remembered, a weird elfin creature with extraordinary black eyes and hair and a clear white face.  Her one regret in those days had been that she was not born a horse, and she had lived in the stables, in as horse like a fashion as was possible.  Her ankle indeed still must bear an unnecessary scar through the application of a fierce horse-liniment to a sprain.  No doubt, however, she had long since changed her ambitions.  Sir Charles calculated her age.  Resilda Mardale must be twenty-five years old and a deuced fine woman into the bargain.  Sir Charles took a glance at his figure in his cheval-glass.  He had reached middle-age to be sure, but he had a leg that many a spindle-shanked youngster might envy, nor was there any unbecoming protuberance at his waist.  He wrote a letter accepting the invitation and a week later in the dusk of a June evening, drove up the long avenue of trees to the terrace of the Quarry House.