“Boy,” he then said, “turn round and listen to me.”

I obeyed him at once.

“Listen well,” he said, “for I am not given to confidences.  Yet I am going to speak to you of the secret places of my life.”

I laid down the pen which I had been holding between my fingers, and turned my chair.  I judged that it was not necessary for me to speak, nor apparently did he think so.

“I have been soldiering all my days,” he said, “since I was a child almost.  It is a glorious life.  God knows I have never grudged a single month of it.  But when one comes back once more to dwell amongst civilians one realizes that there is another side to life.  It is so with me.  I am not given to doubts or to asking advice from any man.  But the time has come when I have the one and need of the other.”

He paused, knocked out some ashes from his pipe, and relighted it.

“I have loved two women in my life, Guy,” he went on slowly.  “The first was your mother.”

I started a little, but I still held my peace.  He looked hard into the ashes of the fire, and continued.

“I tried my best,” he said, “to be a friend to her after her marriage, and I hope, I think, that I succeeded.  I even did my best to fight that woman’s influence with your father at Gibraltar.  There I failed.  I was foredoomed to failure!  She had the trick of playing what tune she cared to on a man’s heartstrings.  After it was all over, and your father and she had left the place, I spent years trying to persuade your mother to get a divorce and marry me.  But she was the daughter of a Bishop, a High Churchwoman, and a holy woman.  She died with your father’s name upon her lips.”

I shuddered!  The words were spoken so deliberately, and yet with such vibrant force.

“After that,” Ray continued, “came Egypt, then India, and afterwards Khartoum.  I came home before the last war, and I met Lady Angela.  I am so little of a woman’s man that I suppose the girl whom I thought of at all became like an angel, a creature altogether apart from that sex of whom I know so little.  However that may be, she was the second woman to hold any place in my—­heart—­as she most surely will be the last.  Then the war broke out, luck came my way, and I returned with a greater reputation than I deserved.  The very night of my return I asked Lady Angela to marry me, and she consented.”

He puffed vigorously at his pipe, but he seemed wholly ignorant of the fact that it was out.  His face was set in its grimmest lines.  He looked steadily at a certain spot in the fire, and went on.