When the Widow Summermatter had departed I sat down in Peter’s arm-chair and took stock of the place.  It was quiet and simple and homely, and through the window came the gleam of snow on the diamond hills.  On the table beside the stove were Peter’s cherished belongings—­his buck-skin pouch and the pipe which Jannie Grobelaar had carved for him in St Helena, an aluminium field match-box I had given him, a cheap large-print Bible such as padres present to well-disposed privates, and an old battered Pilgrim’s Progress with gaudy pictures.  The illustration at which I opened showed Faithful going up to Heaven from the fire of Vanity Fair like a woodcock that has just been flushed.  Everything in the room was exquisitely neat, and I knew that that was Peter and not the Widow Summermatter.  On a peg behind the door hung his much-mended coat, and sticking out of a pocket I recognized a sheaf of my own letters.  In one corner stood something which I had forgotten about—­an invalid chair.

The sight of Peter’s plain little oddments made me feel solemn.  I wondered if his eyes would be like Mary’s now, for I could not conceive what life would be for him as a cripple.  Very silently I opened the bedroom door and slipped inside.

He was lying on a camp bedstead with one of those striped Swiss blankets pulled up round his ears, and he was asleep.  It was the old Peter beyond doubt.  He had the hunter’s gift of breathing evenly through his nose, and the white scar on the deep brown of his forehead was what I had always remembered.  The only change since I last saw him was that he had let his beard grow again, and it was grey.

As I looked at him the remembrance of all we had been through together flooded back upon me, and I could have cried with joy at being beside him.  Women, bless their hearts! can never know what long comradeship means to men; it is something not in their lives—­something that belongs only to that wild, undomesticated world which we forswear when we find our mates.  Even Mary understood only a bit of it.  I had just won her love, which was the greatest thing that ever came my way, but if she had entered at that moment I would scarcely have turned my head.  I was back again in the old life and was not thinking of the new.

Suddenly I saw that Peter was awake and was looking at me.

‘Dick,’ he said in a whisper, ‘Dick, my old friend.’

The blanket was tossed off, and his long, lean arms were stretched out to me.  I gripped his hands, and for a little we did not speak.  Then I saw how woefully he had changed.  His left leg had shrunk, and from the knee down was like a pipe stem.  His face, when awake, showed the lines of hard suffering and he seemed shorter by half a foot.  But his eyes were still like Mary’s.  Indeed they seemed to be more patient and peaceful than in the days when he sat beside me on the buck-waggon and peered over the hunting-veld.

I picked him up—­he was no heavier than Mary—­and carried him to his chair beside the stove.  Then I boiled water and made tea, as we had so often done together.