He paused.

“I remember,” said Derrick.  “Well?”

“Well,” said Carlyon gravely, “that is what I have done all my life, what I mean to do now.  You are in full possession of the facts of the case.  You have defined my position fairly accurately.  I did know you were in an impossible corner.  I did know that you and the men with you were in all probability doomed.  And—­I did not think good to send a rescue.  You do not understand the game of war.  You merely went in for it for the sake of sport, I for the sake of the stakes.  There is a difference.  More than that I do not mean to say.”

He sat down opposite Derrick as he ended and began to smoke with an air of indifference.  But his eyes were on the boy’s face.  They had been close friends for years.

Derrick still sat forward.  He was staring at the ground heavily, silently Carlyon had given him a shock.  Somehow he had not expected from him this cool acknowledgment of an action from which he himself shrank with unspeakable abhorrence.

To leave a friend in the lurch was, in Derrick’s eyes, an act so infamous that he would have cut his own throat sooner than be guilty of it.  It did not occur to him that Carlyon might have urged extenuating circumstances, but had rather scornfully abstained from doing so.

He did not even consider the fact that, as commanding-officer, Carlyon’s responsibility for the lives in his charge was a burden not to be ignored or lightly borne.  He did not consider the risk to these same valuable lives that a rescue in force would have involved.

He saw only himself fighting for a forlorn hope, his grinning little Goorkhas gallantly and intrepidly following wherever he would lead, and he saw the awful darkness down which his feet had stumbled, a terrible chasm that had yawned to engulf them all.

He sat up at last and looked straight at Carlyon.  He spoke slowly, with an effort.

“If it had been only myself,” he said, “I—­perhaps, I might have found it easier.  But there were the men, my men.  You could not alter your plans by one hair’s-breadth to save their gallant lives.  I can’t get over that.  I never shall.  You left us to die like rats in a hole.  But for a total stranger—­a spy, a Secret Service man—­we should have been cut to pieces, every one of us.  You did not, I suppose, send that man to help us out?”

Carlyon blew a cloud of smoke upwards.  He frowned a little, but his look was more one of boredom than annoyance.

“What exactly are you talking about?” he said.  “I don’t employ spies.  As to Secret Service agents, I think you have heard my opinion of them before.”

“Yes,” said Derrick.  He rose with an air of finality.  His young face was very stern.  “He was probably attached to General Harford’s division.  He found us in a fix, and he helped us out of it.  He knew the land.  We didn’t.  He was the most splendid fighting-man I ever saw.  He tried to stick up for you, too—­said you didn’t know.  That, of course, was a mistake.  You did know, and are not ashamed to own it.”