“You must be tired, sir, after your journey,” Laurence said to Hammond. “If you would care to refresh yourself, my hut is at your disposal, and there is clean water to hand here above the falls; Mr. Shipley will, I hope, be so good as to show you the way,” beckoning to that fellow.

“Oh—oh, certainly,” Hammond said, and went away, though he looked over his shoulder more than once, despite the rough ground, as if to read Laurence’s thoughts off his face.

“Of course you shall not do anything you would dislike, Laurence,” Temeraire said, when Hammond had gone away, and left them in privacy, “only, it does not seem to me there is anything to object to in going to Brazil, and you should have your title back, and your rank.”

“That, my dear, can be nothing more than a polite fiction,” Laurence said. “I cannot pretend that I am in any real sense an officer of any corps when I am determined never again to submit to orders which my own judgment should find immoral.”

A fiction which brought with it bars of gold, and changed entirely the mode in which persons addressed you, seemed to Temeraire real enough for anyone’s taste. “And after all, it is not as though they must give you dreadful orders: perhaps they will have learned their lesson, and think better of it, from now on,” he said hopefully. He did not have any great reliance on the wisdom of the Government, but anyone might be expected to learn, after so many proofs, that he and Laurence were not to be cowed into doing anything which was not just.

“I am sure they will not rely upon either of us to any extent further than they must,” Laurence said.

He was silent again: standing, with his hands clasped behind his back, and looking out over the great expanse of the valley; even in his rough clothes his shoulders were as straight as though they still bore the golden epaulets in which Temeraire had first seen him, and only a little imagination was required to restore to him his uniform, his green coat and the leather harness, and the golden bars. Laurence paused and after a moment longer asked, “Do you wish to go, then?”