He leaned back in his chair and filled his pipe, packing it carefully. Then he lighted a match.
Some one fumbled at the door knob in an uncertain way; hesitated, and tried again.
"Come in!" shouted the Lieutenant. The noise hurt his nerves.
The door opened and Rob entered. His eyes looked shadowy by contrast to the pinched paleness of his face. He walked with difficulty. His short legs got tangled up in the long coat he had gotten from one of the men of the rescuing party, and he stumbled over it.
The Lieutenant rose. The match burned down to his fingers and he mechanically tossed it into the fire. Then he laid down his pipe.
The short odd figure in the long overcoat advanced to the middle of the room, facing Cary’s father.
"Cary—" he began, and then stopped a moment and cleared his throat. It seemed still full of salt water. "I stole Lieutenant Burden’s boat and I took Cary and Johnny out. The storm came. I knew it was coming, but I didn’t care, and I went. And I lost the oars and—" The salt water feeling came back.
Trevelyan’s boy shook the long sleeves away from his hands, which he pushed down into the great pockets of the coat, where they hunted around for themselves. The Lieutenant was tall and Trevelyan’s boy was short, and he had to look up a long way before he could look him full in the face.
"She’s coming," he said, "and so’s Johnny. They both feel sort of sick, but I’m all right, and so I’ve come here. I thought we’d better have it over with."
"Why, the thrashing! Of course, you’ll thrash me."
Cary’s father caught him as he fell and laid him on the lounge.
That night Cary was ill. The next day she was worse. She complained of a sharp pain in her side and toward evening she began to breathe heavily.
At nine, when the post surgeon came again, she was burning with fever, and he shook his head when he listened to her lungs.
"It looks confoundedly like pneumonia," he told the Lieutenant who was standing anxiously by Cary’s little brass bed, and he went off to look up a nurse.
The Lieutenant bent over the child a moment after the surgeon had left, and then he turned hastily away and lowered the lamp and shaded its glare from Cary’s eyes. Then he went over to the window and stood looking out. Below him stretched the yard of his quarters. It was Cary’s playground. Beyond the garden lay the parade ground and further off the other officers’ quarters. He could see Cary now, her long, straight hair flying in the wind as she tore by the flagstaff to meet him on his return from duty. Way off in the distance he could see the dim, dark outline of the Fort’s walls, and beyond, the strip of moonlit sea. He had used to carry Cary on his shoulders, when she was a baby, along those walls and she had used to clap her hands at the sunlight dancing on the water. Everything spoke to him of Cary. He turned and went back to the bed and knelt down by it and buried his head close to the child’s—so close that he could feel her hot breath on his cheek.