He came forward a step and swayed.
Cary's father caught him as he fell and laid him on the lounge.
* * * * *
That night Cary was ill. The next day she was worse. She complained of a sharp pain in her side and toward evening she began to breathe heavily.
At nine, when the post surgeon came again, she was burning with fever, and he shook his head when he listened to her lungs.
"It looks confoundedly like pneumonia," he told the Lieutenant who was standing anxiously by Cary's little brass bed, and he went off to look up a nurse.
The Lieutenant bent over the child a moment after the surgeon had left, and then he turned hastily away and lowered the lamp and shaded its glare from Cary's eyes. Then he went over to the window and stood looking out. Below him stretched the yard of his quarters. It was Cary's playground. Beyond the garden lay the parade ground and further off the other officers' quarters. He could see Cary now, her long, straight hair flying in the wind as she tore by the flagstaff to meet him on his return from duty. Way off in the distance he could see the dim, dark outline of the Fort's walls, and beyond, the strip of moonlit sea. He had used to carry Cary on his shoulders, when she was a baby, along those walls and she had used to clap her hands at the sunlight dancing on the water. Everything spoke to him of Cary. He turned and went back to the bed and knelt down by it and buried his head close to the child's—so close that he could feel her hot breath on his cheek.
"I was a fool," he told himself, passionately, "to fancy I could care for a little flower, but I couldn't give her up after her mother died."
He rose presently and cautiously heightened the lamp and wrote a hurried line on a scrap of paper.
"Cary is ill. Pneumonia. Mam' Amy is away. Will you come?"