If the truth be said, William was not a natural officer. Affable, accomplished, handsome, with a strong sense of justice, there was a streak of stubbornness and of pride woven deep within his nature. He had no desire to command men. Military strategy did not absorb him. Such appetite as he had for firearms or for blood was easily satisfied by the modest exertions of the partridge shooting season. He did not care very much for a life among soldiers, preferring his own bed and the comforts of home. He enjoyed also the civilian freedom to express whatever opinions he cared to form. But filial duty could not be lightly dismissed. To serve the Crown was an honour the Gales were proud to undertake. A commission was obtained. Thus it was that, two years later, he had found himself on board a ship bound for the Black Sea. A number of his fellows had sold out, rather than face the skirmishes which may have lain ahead. But this had seemed to William dishonourable. Algernon had joined only at the end of the last year. If William was not by inclination a soldier, Algernon was by temperament entirely unsuited to the martial life. He was dreamy, somewhat slow, with the sweet smile of a much younger fellow.

Here outside Sebastopol, William could not let himself recall the companion of his boyhood, their childish games on the long afternoons; how they had played together, raced together, fished together. He and his brother and sister full of fun at nursery tea, taking their buttered bread and sprinkling tiny amber crystals of demerara sugar upon it, purloined from the sugar-bowl, whenever their nurse was not looking. Algie’s small freckled limbs, as a child of seven or eight, splashing in the clear brown shallows of the stream. How his teeth had chattered, his lips paled, the first time he had fired a gun. That had been their father’s 20-bore, when they had set out to shoot pigeons in the fields one afternoon. Although Algie had not hit a bird, still the force of it, the noise, had shaken him. There came into William’s mind those times – oh the pity of it! – when he had remonstrated with Algie, found fault with him for being too slow, too timid, too fond of remaining indoors. Oftentimes the boy had preferred to sit on the window seat in the nursery with Caroline, drawing, than to come outside and play rough and tumble. William remembered the incline of Algernon’s head, as he had concentrated on his drawing book. The thought of his youthful seriousness was inexpressibly tender. Yet he must not think of these things.