“Why I came to see you, I don’t know,” he said after quarter of an hour.

After a further five minutes I looked aside at him. I caught his eye. How intensely he can regard me.

He did not turn. He did not blink. Reflected in his wide grey-blue gaze which dazzled me was the window behind me. The whites of his eyes, glossy and tinged with blue, for moments mesmerized me. A wind fluctuated hard against the small panes. In Smahil’s eyes I saw the sky grey. I went to the window. Endless lines of glass beads, slipping through fingers unseen in the sky, above and bigger than the clouds—were the lines descending or ascending, or motionless?

“Winter not gone yet.”

The little clatter at the other end of the kitchen seemed so remote. The work of scullions by the door-tables, the pages casting dice on the bagstones with the spit-boy at the fire. Here all was quite sombre and desolate.

I began to sing again as I scrubbed, a dreary ballad full of falling cadences in the minor key. I am most at home in dreariness.

Smahil put his arms on the table, his head on them. The beads continued to click from outside against the panes, splish-ing, spreading down in sluicing channels.

And at this moment, which seemed to sum up the end of most things, there was a row outside. A harsh, unsteady noise, shouting. Some clashes.

A stone smashed through the window.

I was still bewildered as it bounded into the biggest pot, ricocheted on the grease I’d been trying so long to remove, and bounded up again. It hit Smahil a glancing blow on his cheekbone.

There was shouting at the other end of the kitchen. Then the far door opened. A number of soldiers reeled in, our fellows, awkwardly carrying some wounded.

Smahil, bleeding, strode up to them.

“What are you doing here, hogs? This is the General’s headquarters.”

“We know that, sir.” A tattered sergeant touched his shako-peak. “Beg pardon, sir it’s all we could do. There’s several of our poor boys hurt, sir, and more than half of us again is them Southern bastards out in the street.”

Smahil didn’t waste time with silly questions like, “They attacked you, did they?” He was already strapping on his sword belt when the General himself and several other commanders walked in.

Everybody straightened up and saluted in astonishment, and a wounded man who’d just been propped against the wall lurched down again.

“Something doing out there, boys?” inquired the General and they guffawed. “Yussir, if you please, sir,” said the wounded trooper. “Them Southern bastards again, sir.” The sergeant frowned but the General clapped the trooper on the shoulder. “Officer,” he said, and Smahil who had relaxed came to attention again.

“Sir.”

“Take a few of these men and scatter those Southerners.”

“Yessir.”

Smahil went out, with the sergeant and unwounded troopers again.