'Your wife?'
'Oh, yes, my wife. She goes everywhere with me.'
The face of the Dictator looked rather blank. He did not quite see the appropriateness of petticoats in actual warfare—unless, perhaps, the short petticoats of a vivandière; and he hoped that Captain Sarrasin's wife was not a vivandière.
'You see,' Sarrasin said cheerily, 'my wife and I are very fond of each other, and our one little child is long since dead, and we have nobody else to care much about. And she is a tall woman, nearly as tall as I am, and she dresses up as my aide-de-camp; and she has gone with me into all my fights. And we find it so convenient that if ever I should get killed, then, of course, she would manage to get killed too, and vice versâ—vice versâ, of course. And that would be so convenient, don't you see? We are so used to each other, one of us couldn't get on alone.'
The Dictator felt his eyes growing a little moist at this curious revelation of conjugal affection.
'May I have the honour soon,' he asked, 'of being presented to Mrs. Sarrasin?'
'Mrs. Sarrasin, sir,' said her husband, 'will come whenever she is asked or sent for. Mrs. Sarrasin will regard it as the highest honour of her life to be allowed to serve upon your staff with me.'
'Has she been with you in all your campaigns?' Ericson asked.
'In all what I may call my irregular warfare, certainly,' Captain Sarrasin answered. 'When first we married I was in the British service, sir; and of course they wouldn't allow anything of the kind there. But after that I gave up the English army—there wasn't much chance of any real fighting going on—and I served in all sorts of odd irregular campaignings, and Mrs. Sarrasin found out that she preferred to be with me—and so from that time we fought, as I may say, side by side. She has been wounded more than once—but she doesn't mind. She is not the woman to care about that sort of thing. She is a very remarkable woman.'
'She must be,' the Dictator said earnestly. 'When shall I have the chance of seeing her? When may I call on her?'