"It's too beastly disgusting," he declared to his chief confidant. "That old wretch of a Boney. I wish I could shoot him."
"You must be more careful, Roy. Walls have ears in France."
"He hasn't any right to keep me. I've a right to go home."
"I'm afraid the First Consul cares little for any man's rights, except his own."
"Den, don't you want to go home?"
Did he not want it? The handsome bronzed face, which had of late grown thinner than its wont, looked at Roy with a concentrated stillness. "Yes; more than you can understand, perhaps. When I think of all that is going on elsewhere—"
"You'd like to be fighting under Sir John Moore, wouldn't you? And it makes one so mad to be penned up here for nothing."
Roy's words found too sharp an echo in Denham's mind to be met lightly. He said after a slight pause: "If you feel so, can't you see what it must be to me?"
Roy was conscious of something unusual in the quiet features.
"Den, I say—"