Raymond did not know what to answer.  He could not be so rude as to make any reflection on Mrs. Quintan, though he was stirred with resentment against her.  This noble, angelic, saintly woman, who in every gesture reminded him of dead queens and historic personages!  It went to his heart to think of her, bereft and lonely, in that splendid house he had so lately quitted.  He recognised, in the unmistakable accord between him and her, the fellowship of a pair who, in different ways and in different stations, had yet fought and suffered and endured for what they judged their duty.  Forty-two years old!  Singular coincidence, in itself almost a bond between them, that he, too, was of an identical age.  Forty-two!  Why, it was called the prime of life.  He inhaled a deep breath of air; it was the prime of life; until then no one had really begun to live!

“Why don’t you say something?” said Quintan.

“I was just thinking how mistaken you were,” returned Raymond.  “There must be hundreds of men who would be proud to win her slightest regard; who, instead of considering her faded or old, would choose her out of a thousand of younger women and would be happy for ever if she would take—­” He was going to say them, but that sounded improper, and he changed it, at the cost of grammar, to “him.”

Quintan laughed at his companion’s vehemence, and the subject passed and gave way to another about shrapnel.  But he did not fail, later on, to carry a humorous report of the conversation to his aunt.

“What have you been doing to my old quartermaster?” he said.  “Hasn’t the poor fellow enough troubles as it is, without falling in love with you!  He can’t talk of anything else, and blushes like a girl when he mentions your name.  He told me yesterday he was willing to die for a woman like you.”

“I think he’s a dear, nice fellow,” said Miss Latimer, “and if he wants to love me he can.  It will keep him out of mischief!”

Raymond saw a great deal of Miss Latimer in the month before they sailed south.  Quintan took him constantly to the house, where, in his capacity of humble and devoted comrade, the tall quartermaster was always welcome and made much of.  Mrs. Quintan was alive to the value of this attached follower, who might be trusted to guard her son in the perils that lay before him.  She treated him as a sort of combination of valet, nurse, and poor relation, asking him all sorts of intimate questions about Howard’s socks and underclothing, and holding him altogether responsible for the boy’s welfare.  Her tone was one of anxious patronage, touching at times on a deeper emotion when she often broke down and cried.  The quartermaster was greatly moved by her trust in him.  The tears would come to his own eyes, and he would try in his clumsy way to comfort her, promising that, so far as it lay with him, Howard should return safe and sound.  In his self-abnegation it never occurred to him that his own life was as valuable as Howard Quintan’s.  He acquiesced in the understanding that it was his business to get Howard through the war unscratched, at whatever risk or jeopardy to himself.