"He was always a brave laddie," he said, and his face was wet with tears.
Cary raised the hand she was holding and pressed it to her cheek, and she held it there—brown and thin and heavily veined—against the delicate texture, and caressed it in the way that women have.
"He was a great soul. I always knew it! I—always—knew—it—" she told them brokenly.
"He was a Briton," said the old officer of the Empire. "I didn't always understand him—I blamed him for doing an orderly's work. I'm proud of him—but if it had been anything but the cholera—I saw it once myself in Bombay; I ran away from it—" he raised his head, "anything but that! But—I'm proud of him!"
Stewart still stood by the oriel window leaning against his arm flung over his head, and he was crying—hardly and bitterly as a man cries. The stillness of the outside world increased. The sun crept into the corner of the room.
"I can't quite take it in—" said the old man slowly, looking past the girl to a far-off field of thistle and staring at the purplish bloom. "It's hard to think of Robert—gone!"
And then:
"I can't think of the rest—the details—" he clenched his hands fiercely, "the pain—the thirst—" and his eyes came back to Cary. "There! There! There's something about it all that we can't understand, I fancy, but there is the honor—that thing which does not perish with the using!"
He turned abruptly, and when Cary, half fearful for him, would have followed, he motioned her away, and went out alone on the back terrace.
Stewart had not moved from the window, and Cary went and stood beside him, gravely looking out at the sunlight shifting on the lawn. She did not say anything, but as though conscious that they were alone, he spoke, his face still hidden on his arm.