'She knew everybody's name,' said the colonel. 'And so that was all?'
'That was all, except that my blessing has gone with you, sir, from that day. Man and boy it has gone with you.'
'Ma'am, if I had guessed it, some weary days in India might have been less weary.'
So they sat talking for a while; but, by degrees, the invalid's eyes had grown pre-occupied.
'Netta, dear,' she asked at length, 'do you think we might ask the colonel to honour us by sharing our Christmas dinner to-morrow?'
In that luckless moment Colonel Baigent glanced up, caught sight of Miss Netta's face, and saw that in it which made his own colour to the roots of his hair. Then he gave a gulp, and faced the situation like the brave man he was.
'Ma'am,' he said gently, 'you have taken me for a friend, and God knows, my friends are few enough. I am going to treat you as a very old friend, and to dismiss all tact. You will eat your Christmas dinner with me to-morrow, here, in this house.'
On his way back to the hotel Colonel Baigent halted to stare up at the minster tower. So much of his life had been spent under the shadow of it!—and yet, of all his sowing, one small act alone, long forgotten, had taken root here and survived.
In his dreams next morning he heard the minster bell ringing for early service. In his dreams, for a stroke or two, the remembered note of it carried him back to boyhood. Then he awoke with a start, and jumped out of bed.
Far up the hill the bugles from the barracks challenged the note of the bell. Over the muslin blind drawn half-way across his window the sun shone on a clear, frosty morning; and in the haze of it, as he dressed, his eyes rested, across the clustered roofs, on an angle of the minster tower, and beyond it on the hill with the quarry hewn in its side, and the clump of trees remembered of all who in boyhood have been sons of the city's famous school.