"Shall I read to you a little?" asked the girl, timidly. Then the corporal took down an old brown Testament from the shelf, and Waveney read slowly and reverently, passage after passage, until the heavy breathing told her that McGill was asleep. Then she closed the book and went out into the corridor.
"He is very ill," she said, sorrowfully; "so feeble and so unlike himself." But the corporal refuted this stoutly.
"McGill is but poorly," he returned, so gruffly that Waveney did not venture to say more. "When he has taken a bottle or two of the doctor's stuff, he will pick up a bit; he sleeps badly, and that makes him drowsy and confused," and then he saluted, and stumped back to his comrade.
Waveney heard a different story downstairs.
"Have you seen McGill?" two or three said to her. "The poor chap, he is breaking fast. The corporal won't believe it, but it is plain as a pike-staff;" and so on.
"Mollie, dear," observed Waveney, sadly, "I have such bad news to tell you: dear old Sergeant McGill is very ill, and I fear he is going to die; and what will the corporal do without him? And it is so strange;" she went on, "he thinks he is a lad again, in his Highland home, and that his sweetheart Sheila is coming to meet him. He calls her the lass of his heart, and it is all so poetical and beautiful;" and Waveney's voice was so full of pathos that Mollie's eyes filled with sympathetic tears.
CHAPTER XI.
"A NOTICEABLE MAN, WITH LARGE GREY EYES."
"As high as we have mounted in delight
In our dejection do we sink as low."
Wordsworth.