He had long been persuaded that had the dowager countess not thus given the note to his character his record would never have been written on that roll of heroes.  “I should have funked it,” was his way of putting it, by which he meant that he would have funked it through sheer ignorance of himself and of his aptitude for the high and noble.  It was an aptitude that flourished best under an appreciative eye—­of the dowager countess looking down from heaven—­or of the discerning here on earth—­as an actor is encouraged by a sympathetic public to his highest histrionic efforts.  If there was anything histrionic in Ashley himself, it was only in the sense that he was at his finest when, actually or potentially, there was some one there to see.  He had powers then of doing precisely the right thing which in solitude might have been dormant from lack of motive.

It was undoubtedly because he felt the long-sighted eyes of England on him that he had done precisely the right thing in winning the Victoria Cross.  He confessed this—­to himself.  He confessed it often—­every time, in fact, when he came to a difficult passage in his life.  It was his strength, his inspiration.  He confessed it now.  If he sat silent while Olivia Guion waited till it seemed good to him to speak, it was only that he might remind himself of the advantages of doing the right thing, however hard.  He had tested those advantages time and time again.  The very memories they raised were a rebuke to weakness and hesitation.  If he ever had duties he was inclined to shirk, he thought of that half-hour which had forever set the seal upon his reputation as a British soldier.

He thought of it now.  He saw himself again looking up at the bristling cliffs that were to be rushed, whence the Afridis were pouring their deadly fire.  He saw himself measuring with his eye the saddle of precipitous slope that had to be crossed, devoid of cover and strewn with the bodies of dead Ghurkas.  Of the actual crossing, with sixty Rangers behind him, he had little or no recollection.  He had passed under the hail of bullets as through perils in a dream.  As in a dream, too, he remembered seeing his men, when he turned to cheer them on, go down like nine-pins—­throwing up their arms and staggering, or twisting themselves up like convulsive cats.  It was grotesque rather than horrible; he felt himself grinning inwardly, as at something hellishly comic, when he reached the group of Ghurkas huddled under the cavernous shelter of the cliff.  Then, just as he threw himself on the ground, panting like a spent dog and feeling his body all over to know whether or not he had been wounded, he saw poor Private Vickerson out in the open, thirty yards from the protection of the wall of rock.  While the other Rangers to a man were lying still, on the back with the knees drawn up, or face downward, with the arms outstretched, or rolled on the side as though they were in bed, Vickerson was rising on his hands and dragging himself