“I saw you laughing and talking to her in front of her father’s house.  I heard you with her in their garden the evening before you left and she disappeared, and it was my voice you heard in the lane.  Had I known that you were going that night, I would have followed you and killed you, and saved her.  The next morning you were both gone.  I waited a time and then went to the depot of your regiment and enlisted.  I had failed to save her, but at least I could avenge her.  That bullet was mine, and had you not stumbled over a Pandy’s body, I suppose, just as I pulled my trigger, you would have been a dead man.

“I did not know that I had failed, and, rushing forward with my company, was in the thickest of the fight.  I wanted to be killed, but no shot struck me, and at last, when chasing a Pandy along a passage in the Kaiser Bagh, he turned and levelled his piece at me.  Mine was loaded, and I could have shot him down as he turned, but I stood and let him have his shot.  When I found myself here I was sorry that he had not finished me at once, but when I heard that you were alive, and likely to recover, I thanked him in my heart that he had left me a few more days of life, that I could let you know that it was I who had fired, and that Martha’s wrong had not been wholly unavenged.”

He sank back exhausted on to the pillow.  Frank Mallett had made no attempt to interrupt him:  the sudden agony of his wound and his astonishment at this strange accusation had given him so grave a shock that he leaned against the wall behind him in silent wonder.

“Hello!  Mallett, what the deuce is the matter with you?” the surgeon exclaimed, as, looking up from a patient over whom he was bending a short distance away, his eyes fell on the officer’s face.  “You look as if you were going to faint, man.

“Here, orderly, some brandy and water, quickly!”

Frank drank some of the brandy and water and sat down for a few minutes.  Then, when he saw the surgeon at the other end of the room, he got up and went across to Lechmere’s bed.

“There is some terrible mistake, Lechmere,” he said, quietly.  “I swear to you on my honour as a gentleman that you are altogether wrong.  From the moment that I got into my dog cart at Bennett’s I never saw Martha again.  I know nothing whatever of this talk in the garden.  Did you think you saw me as well as heard me?”

“No, you were on one side of that high wall and I on the other, but I heard enough to know who it was.  You told her that you had to go abroad at once, but that if she would come out there you would put her in charge of someone until you could marry her.  You told her that she could not stay where she was long, and I knew what that meant.  I suppose she is at Calcutta still waiting, for of course she could not have come out with you.  I suppose that she is breaking her heart there now—­if she is not dead, as I hope she is.”

“Did you hear the word Calcutta or India mentioned, Lechmere?”