'To win honour and rank, if I can. But you, sir?'
'To forget—if possible—to forget!' was the somewhat enigmatical reply of Hammersley. Then, after a long pause, he said somewhat irrelevantly, 'My instinct told me from the first that you are a gentleman, though a sergeant in my company.'
'Yes, I am a gentleman,' replied Florian; 'I have passed through a school of adversity to you unknown, Captain Hammersley.
'Sorry to hear it—poor fellow.'
'And yet, sir, if I may venture to make the remark, from some things I have heard you say, you seem to be at warfare with the world.'
'In one sense, at least, I am embittered against it,' said Hammersley, and urged, he knew not by what emotion, unless that impulse which inspires men at times to make strange confidences, he added, 'I have learned the truth of what an author says, "That a woman can smile in a man's face and breathe vows of fidelity in his ear, each one of which is black as her own heart." This is the reason I volunteered for this rough work. Have you learned that too?'
'No, sir, thank Heaven!'
'As yet you are lucky; some day you may be undeceived.'
The noise made by the convoy, two miles and a half long, descending towards the river, could now be heard in the rear. It consisted of 113 waggons, each drawn by twelve oxen; fifty strongly wheeled Scottish carts; and about fifty mules all laden.
Every man carried in his spare and expansion pouches 200 rounds of ball-cartridge.