"I have a job for you, Mike."
"What is it, your honour?"
"I want you to take off all the marks of a field officer from my clothes. I am going to be a captain again."
Mike looked with surprise at his master.
"Well, your honour, it is ungrateful bastes they must be. Sure I thought that the least they could do was to make you a full major, though if they had made you a colonel, it would be no more than you deserve."
"I was offered the majority, Mike, but I declined it. It would be absurd, at my age, to have such a rank, and I should be ashamed to look officers of our brigade, who have done nigh twenty years of good service and are still only captains, in the face. I would much rather remain as I am."
"Well, it may be you are right, sir, but it is disappointed I am, entirely."
"You will get over it, Mike," Desmond laughed.
"That may be," Mike said doubtfully, "but I should have felt mighty proud of being a colonel's servant."
"I don't suppose you will ever be that, Mike. You know that, after the last war was over, several of the Irish regiments were disbanded, and no doubt it will be the same when this war is finished, so you could not count upon seeing me a colonel, at any rate not for another twenty years."