His eyes had wandered where Lisabel, with one of her white elbows on the table, sat coquetting with a bunch of grapes, listening with downcast eyes to “my Colin.”
“Doctor Urquhart, whom I met at the Cedars last week. You said he was a friend of yours.”
“So he is; the best I ever had,” and it was refreshing to see how the young fellow brightened up. “He saved my life. But for him I should assuredly be lying with a cross over my head, inside that melancholy stone wall round the top of Cathcart's Hill.”
“You mean the cemetery there.—What sort of a place is it?”
“Just as I said—the bare top of a hill, with a wall round it, and stones of various sorts, crosses, monuments, and so on. All our officers were buried there.”
“And the men?”
“Oh, anywhere. It didn't matter.”
It did not, I thought; but not exactly from Captain Treherne's point of view. However, he was scarcely the man with whom to have started an abstract argument. I might, had he been Doctor Urquhart.
“Was Doctor Urquhart in the Crimea the whole time?”
“To be sure. He went through all the campaign, from Varna to Sebastopol; at first unattached, and then was appointed to our regiment. Well for me that! What a three months I had after Inkerman! Shall I ever forget the day I first crawled out and sat on the benches in front of the hospital, on Balaklava Heights, looking down over the Black Sea?”