"They tell me," he said, with a smile, "that he is wonderfully like me but, strangely enough, he reminds me rather of my wife. You remember her, Shepherd? For you were stationed at Meerut, at the time I married her there."
Colonel Shepherd nodded and, for a few minutes, the two friends sat silent; thinking over the memories which the words had evoked.
"Strange, is it not," Colonel Ripon went on, arousing himself, "that the child of some pauper parents should have a resemblance, however distant, to me and my wife?"
"Curiously enough," Colonel Shepherd said, "the boy was not born of pauper parents. He was left at the door of the workhouse, at Ely, by a tramp; whose body was found, next morning, in one of the ditches. It was a stormy night; and she had, no doubt, lost her way after leaving the child. That was why they called him William Gale.
"Why, what is the matter, Ripon? Good heavens, are you ill?"
Colonel Shepherd's surprise was natural. The old officer sat rigid in his chair, with his eyes open and staring at his friend; and yet, apparently, without seeing him. The color in his face had faded away and, even through the deep bronze of the Indian sun, its pallor was visible.
Colonel Shepherd rose in great alarm, and was about to call for assistance when his friend, with a slight motion of his hand, motioned to him to abstain.
"How old is he?" came presently, in a strange tone, from his lips.
"How old is who?" Colonel Shepherd asked, in surprise. "Oh, you mean Gale! He is not nineteen yet, though he looks four or five years older. He was under seventeen, when he enlisted; and I rather strained a point to get him in, by hinting that, when he was asked his age, he had better say under nineteen. So he was entered as eighteen, but I know he was more than a year younger than that.
"But what has that to do with it, my dear old friend? What is the matter with you?"