The song and the music swelled, the tramp of young, active, vigorous soldiers echoed and reached down the quiet street.

Colonel Oakley turned his face to his pillow and burst into tears; the bitterness of death was given him to drink in overflowing measure.

It seemed as though a jibe was flung at him.
The tramp of the battalion had not yet died away when Oakley sank again into unconsciousness.
"It was pretty rough that he should just wake up to hear that and to know that he would never have part in it, eh ?" said Luttrell, speaking in a low voice more to himself than to the nurse.

"What he did for us! Pretty hard treatment, eh ?" Luttrell left the home with one thought filling his mind--the regiment.
It had got to justify all Oakley's devotion; it had got somehow to make amends to him, even if he never was to know of it, for this last unfair stroke of destiny.

Luttrell walked across London, dwelling upon the qualities of individual men in the company which was his command--how this man was quick, and that man stupid, and that other inclined to swank, and a fourth had a gift for reading maps, and a fifth would make a real marksman; and so he woke up to find himself before the bookstall in the station at Waterloo.