“MY DEAR ORMONDE,
“This is a begging letter, and I should loathe to write it, under the circumstances, to any man but such a one as you. For I am going to ask a great deal of you and to appeal to that nobleness of character for which I have always admired you and which made you poor Dam’s hero from Lower School days at Wellingborough until you left Sandhurst (and, alas! quarrelled with him—or rather with his memory—about me). That was a sad blow to me, and I tell you again as I told you before, Dam had not the faintest notion that I cared for him and would not have told me that he cared for me had I not shown it. Your belief that he didn’t trouble to warn you because he had me safe is utterly wrong, absurd, and unjust.
“When you did me the great honour and paid me the undeserved and tremendous compliment of asking me to marry you, and I told you that I could not, and why I could not, I never dreamed that Dam could care for me in that way, and I knew that I should never marry any one at all unless he did.
“And on the same occasion, Ormonde, you begged me to promise that if ever you could serve me in any way, I would ask for your help. You were a dear romantic boy then, Ormonde, and I loved you in a different way, and cried all night that you and I could not be friends without thought of love, and I most solemnly promised that I would turn to you if I ever needed help that you could give. (Alas, I thought to myself then that nobody in the world could do anything for me that Dam could not do, and that I should never need help from others while he lived.)
“I want your help, Ormonde, and I want it for Dam—and me.
“You have, of course, heard some garbled scandal about his being driven away from home and cut off from Sandhurst by grandfather. I need not ask if you have believed ill of him and I need not say he is absolutely innocent of any wrong or failure whatever. He is not an effeminate coward, he is as brave as a lion. He is a splendid hero, Ormonde, and I want you to simply strangle and kill any man who says a word to the contrary.
“When he left home, he enlisted, and Haddon Berners saw him in uniform at Folkestone where he had gone from Canterbury (cricket week) to see Amelia Harringport’s gang. Amelia whose sister is to be the Reverend Mrs. Canon Mellifle at Folkestone, you know, met the wretched Haddon being rushed along the front by a soldier and nearly died at the sight—she declares he was weeping!
“Directly she told me I guessed at once that he had met Dam and either insulted or cut him, and that poor Dam, in his bitter humour and self-loathing had used his own presence as a punishment and had made the Haddock walk with him! Imagine the company of Damocles de Warrenne being anything but an ennobling condescension! Fancy Dam’s society a horrible injury and disgrace! To a thing like Haddon Berners!
“Well, I simply haunted Folkestone after that, and developed a love for Amelia Harringport and her brothers that surprised them—hypocrite that I am! (but I was punished when they talked slightingly of Dam and she sneered at the man whom she had shamelessly pursued when all was well with him. She ‘admires’ Haddon now.)
“At last I met him on one of my week-end visits—on a Sunday evening it was—and I simply flew at him in the sight of all respectable, prayer-book-displaying, before-Church-parading, well-behaved Folkestone, and kissed him nearly to death…. And can you believe a woman could be such a fool, Ormonde—while carefully noting the ‘2 Q.G.’ on his shoulder-straps, I never thought to find out his alias—for of course he hides his identity, thinking as he does, poor darling boy, that he has brought eternal disgrace on an honoured name—a name that appears twice on the rolls of the V.C. records.