“Oh!  Oh!  It was very beautiful of you, but I couldn’t help being surprised, for it was rather unusual—­from a stranger.”  He smiled, and Hugo had a gift in smiles, as we know:  smiles for laughter, smiles for reassurance, and smiles to cure embarrassment.  “It was almost as refreshing as a drink of water,” he concluded impersonally.

“You are thirsty?”

“This—­this is morning, isn’t it?” Hugo went on quizzically.

“Yes, yes!”

“Then it must be the next day,” he pursued, still quizzically.  “You see, I said I would not kill any more—­and I will not—­and I was shot and got tagged without even being shipped as freight.  I was thirsty last night, very thirsty, and some one—­I think it was Jake Pilzer—­some one said to go to the fountain of hell for a drink, but I—­I don’t think that a very good place to get a drink, do you?”

Weak and faint as he was, he put a touch of drollery into the question which made her laugh, her eyes sparkling through a moist haze.

“You’re real, aren’t you?” he inquired in sudden perplexity.  “I’m not dreaming?”

“As real as the water I shall bring you.”

Soon Marta was back, holding a glass to his lips.

“There’s no doubt about it; you are real!” said Hugo.

“I feel as if the chimney were still hot but that you had drenched the fire in the grate.”

“Who put this on you?” she asked as she unpinned the placard.

“I’ve a vague idea, from a vague overhearing of the colonel’s remarks, that it is public opinion,” he replied, and seeing, that she was about to tear it up, he arrested her action.  “No, I think I’d like to save it as a souvenir—­the odds are so greatly against me—­as a sort of souvenir to keep up my courage.”

His tone, the way he drew the muscles of his face, ironed out her frown of disgust at public opinion with a smile.  For he made his kind of courage no less light-hearted and free of pose than Dellarme had made his.

Directly the coachman, whom Marta had summoned when she went for the water, appeared with an improvised litter, and the two bore in at the kitchen door a guest for breakfast whose arrival gave Mrs. Galland a distinctly visible surprise.  His uniform was gray, and in her heart of hearts she hated gray as the symbol of an enemy whom her husband had fought.  But when Marta told the story of the part he had played in defence of the chandelier, personal partisanship abetted the motherly impulse that was already breaking down prejudice.  She was busy with a dozen suggestions for his comfort, quite taking matters out of Marta’s hands.

“I know more about the care of the sick than you do!” she insisted.  “One lump or two in your coffee, sir?  There, there, you had better let me hold the cup for you.  You are sure you can sit up?  Then we must have a pillow.”

“I’ll fetch one from the other room,” put in Minna.

“Two will be better!” Marta called after her.