sufferings which had fallen to him-these things Fusilier Barbier must not expect. Stretton, reading the letter by the sick man's bed, thought it heartless and callous as no letter written by a human hand had ever been. Yet-yet, after all, who knew what had happened on that night? The uncle, evidently. It might be something which dishonoured the family beyond all reparation, which, if known, would have disgraced a great name, so that those who bore it in pride must now change it for very shame. Perhaps the father had died because of it, perhaps the sister had been stricken down. Stretton handed the letter back to his colonel.

'It is very sad, sir,' he said.

'Yes, it is very sad,' returned the colonel. But for us this letter means nothing at all. Never speak of it, obliterate it from your memories.' He tore the paper into the tiniest shreds. We have no reproaches, no accusations for what Barbier did before Barbier got out of the train at Sidi Bel-Abbès. That is not our affair. For us the soldier of the Legion is only born on the day when he enlists.'

Thus, in one sentence, the colonel epitomised the character of the Foreign Legion. It was a fine saying, Stretton thought. He knew it to be a true one.

6

'I will say nothing,' said Stretton, and I will forget.'

'That is well. Come with me, for there is another letter which concerns you.'

He turned upon his heel and left the hospital. Stretton followed him to his quarters.

'There is a letter from the War Office which concerns you. Sergeant Ohlsen,' said the colonel, with a smile. You will be gazetted, under your own name, to the first lieutenancy which falls vacant. There is the notification.'

He handed the paper over to Stretton, and shook hands with him. Stretton was not a demonstrative man. He took the notification with no more show of emotion than if it had been some unimportant order of the day.

'Thank you, sir,' he said, quietly; and for a moment his eyes rested on the paper.

But, none the less, the announcement, so abruptly made, caused him a shock. The words danced before his eyes so that he could not read them. He saluted his colonel and went out on to the great open parade ground, and stood there in the middle of that space, alone, under the hot noonday sun.

The thing for which he had striven had come to pass, then. He held the assurance of it in his hand. Hoped for and halfexpected as that proof had been ever since he had led the survivors of the geographical expedition under the gate of Ouargla, its actual coming was to him most wonderful. He looked southwards to where the streak of yellow shone far away. The long marches, the harassing anxiety, the haunting figures of the Touaregs, with their faces veiled in their black masks and their eyes shining between the upper and the lower strip-yes, even those figures which appalled the imagination in the retrospect by a suggestion of inhuman ferocity-what were they all but contributories to this event? His ordeal was over. He had done enough. He could go home.

Stretton did not want for modesty. He had won a commission from the ranks, it is true; but he realised that others had done this before, and under harder conditions. He himself had started with an advantage the advantage of previous service in the English army. His knowledge of the manual exercise, of company and battalion drill had been of the greatest use at the first. He had had luck, too-the luck to be sent on the expedition to the Figuig oasis, the luck to find himself sergeant with Colonel Tavernay's force. His heart went out in gratitude to that true friend who lay in his bed of sand so far away. Undoubtedly, he realised, his luck had been exceptional.

He turned away from the parade ground and walked through the village, and out of it towards a grove of palm trees. Under the shade of those trees he laid himself down on the ground and made out his plans. He would obtain his commission, secure his release, and so go home. A few months and he would be home! It seemed hardly credible; yet it was true, miraculously true. He would write home that very day. It was not any great success which he had achieved, but, at all events, he was no longer the man who was no good. He could write with confidence; he could write to Millie.

He lay under the shadow of the palms looking across to the village. There rose a little mosque with a white dome. The hovels were thatched for the most part, but here and there a square white-washed house, with a flat roof, overtopped the rest. Hedges of cactus and prickly pears walled in the narrow lanes, and now and then a white robe appeared and vanished. Very soon Stretton would turn his back upon Algeria. In the after time he would

remember this afternoon, remember the village as he saw it now, and the yellow streak of desert sand in the distance,

Stretton lay on his back and put together the sentences which he would write that day to Millie. She would get the letter within ten days easily. He began to hum over to himself the words of the coon song which had once been sung on a summer night in an island of Scotland:

Oh, come out, mah love. I'm a-waitin' fo' you heah!
Doan' you keep yuh window shut to-night.

De tree-tops above am a-whisp'rin' to you, deah

And then he stopped suddenly. At last he began to wonder how Millie would receive the letter he was to write.

Yes, there was her point of view to be considered. Stretton was stubborn by nature as few men are. He had convinced himself that the course he had taken was the only course which promised happiness for Millie and himself, and impelled by that conviction he had gone on his way undisturbed by doubts and questions. Now, however, his object was achieved. He could claim exemption from his wife's contempt. His mind had room for other thoughts, and they came that afternoon.

He had left his wife alone, with no explanation of his absence to offer to her friends, without even any knowledge of his whereabouts. There had been no other way, he still believed. But it was hard on Millie undoubtedly it was hard.

Stretton rose from the ground and set off towards the camp that he might write his letter. But he never wrote it, for as he walked along the lane towards the barracks a man tapped him on the shoulder from behind. He was still humming his song, and he stopped in the middle of it:

Jus' look out an' see all de longin' in mah eyes,
An' mah arms is jus' a-pinin' foh to hug you,

he said, and turned about on his heel. He saw a stranger in European dress, who at once spoke his name.

'Sir Anthony Stretton?'

Stretton was no longer seeking to evade discovery.

'Yes?' he said. The stranger's face became vaguely familiar

to him. 'I have seen you before, I think.'

'Once,' replied the other. 'My name is Warrisden. You saw me for a few minutes on the deck of a fish-carrier in the North Sea.'

'To be sure,' he said, slowly. 'Yes, to be sure, I did. You were sent to find me by Miss Pamela Mardale.'

'She sends me again,' replied Warrisden.

Stretton's heart sank in fear. He had disobeyed the summons before. He remembered Pamela's promise to befriend his wife. He remembered her warning that he should not leave his wife.

'She sent you then with an urgent message that I should return home,' he said.

'I carry the same message again, only it is a thousand times more urgent.'

He drew a letter from his pocket as he spoke, and handed it to Stretton. 'I was to give you this,' he said.

Stretton looked at the handwriting and nodded. 'Thank you,' he said, gravely.

He tore open the envelope and read.

(To be continued.)

167

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.!

The letter which Mrs. Humphry Ward has addressed to the American Ambassador was written for the occasion of the Centenary of Nathaniel Hawthorne, held at Salem on June 23. It is with peculiar pleasure that the CORNHILL MAGAZINE, of the same house which brought out in England 'Transformation' and other works of Hawthorne's, prints this tribute.-ED. CORNHILL.

June 8, 1904.

DEAR MR. CHOATE,-You have asked me to write you a few pages that, in the coming celebration at Salem of the hundredth anniversary of Nathaniel Hawthorne's birth, may be laid, with all the other tributes which the day will call forth, at the feet of Salem's famous son. It seems to me a great honour that you should have asked me to join in the homage of this anniversary; for the author of 'The Scarlet Letter' has always filled a place of peculiar sacredness and delight in my literary memory. So that to express my feeling of admiration and gratitude is only to give a voice to something long since conceived, to shape into some kind of utterance that which for many years has been an emotion and a force. For when I look back to the books which most strongly influenced my own youth, I am aware of a love for certain writings of Hawthorne, a love most ardent, and tenacious, which succeeded a passion of the same kind for certain writings of Mr. Ruskin. In both cases the devotion was hardly rational; it did not spring from any reasoned or critical appreciation of the books, for it dates from years when I was quite incapable of anything of the kind. It was the result, I think, of a vague, inarticulate sense of an appealing beauty, and a beauty so closely mingled with magic and mystery that it haunted memory 'like a passion.' Some scenes from The Scarlet Letter,' and some pages from 'The Stones of Venice,' haunted me in this way. And I can still sharply remember how much this early impression depended upon Hawthorne's austerity, upon his deep-rooted Puritanism, upon what has been often pointed to as 'the sense of sin' in him. Many of the short stories, no less than The Scarlet Letter,' and long before I truly understood them, used to awaken in me a sort of aching and painful joy, which was partly sympathy and partly rebellion. 1 Copyright, 1904, by Mrs. Humphry Ward, in the United States of America.