If you can sit there and say nothing, you are a Christian martyr wasted, that's all." Anthony sprang up, murmuring that he thought there was something wrong behind, which on examination there proved to be.

The end of it was that the chairs were all pushed downwards, with the result that for the rest of that meal there was a fiery gulf fixed between him and Barbara which made further confidences impossible.

So he had to talk of other matters.
Of these, as it chanced, he had something to say.
A letter had arrived that morning from his elder brother George, who was an officer in a line regiment.

It had been written in the trenches before Sebastopol, for these events took place in the mid-Victorian period towards the end of the Crimean War.

Or rather the letter had been begun in the trenches and finished in the military hospital, whither George had been conveyed, suffering from "fever and severe chill," which seemed to be somewhat contradictory terms, though doubtless they were in fact compatible enough.