"Not one."
"I thought there was then," she said.
"Oh, no, that was my conscience. Are you a good doctor for that? Shall I try you?"
"No; thank you; my own is not clear enough."
"Isn't it?" he said. "Then I think the rest of us had better give up in despair."
She made an impatient movement, and said, "Was that Captain Edmonson's ball? You did not tell me, but I guessed it."
"Yes. At first I thought it had only grazed my sleeve. But it was really very little." Archdale, bringing up the wounded on that night of the repulse, had said nothing of being wounded himself, and Elizabeth, meeting him three days afterward with his arm in a sling, had been assured that he was ashamed to speak of such a scratch.
They sat down upon the rocks and talked for a time about the siege and the soldiers, and even about things at home, away from this strange life, but never about what had happened to themselves, and never one word of Katie. Elizabeth seemed to be resting. Archdale thought that she found it pleasant enough, too. But more than once she turned her face in the direction of the hospital, and he knew that she was thinking of her duties there. He must find some way to keep her a little longer. This hour must not be gone yet. What story could he tell her? If he did not begin, in a moment she would get up from that comfortable niche in the rock, and say that it was time to go back to her patients, and then it would be too late.
"I think I never told you," he began, "how Mr. Edmonson's portrait, my great-grandfather's, came into that hiding-place? Would you care to hear?"
"Very much, if it is not too much family history for you to tell me."