“No; tell Miss St. Just that I have no news yet.”  And the Major turns wearily away.

Clara, who has seen him from above, hurries down after him into the street, and coaxes him to come in.  “I am sure you have had no breakfast, sir:  and you look so ill and worn.  And Miss St. Just will be so vexed not to see you.  She will get up the moment she hears you are here.”

“No, my good Miss Clara,” says Campbell, looking down with a weary smile.  “I should only make gloom more gloomy.  Bowie, tell his lordship that I shall be at the afternoon train to-morrow, let what will happen.”

“Ay, ay, sir.  We’re a’ ready to march.  The Major looks very ill, Miss Clara.  I wish he’d have taken your counsel.  And I wish ye’d take mine, and marry me ere I march, just to try what it’s like.”

“I must mind my mistress, Mr. Bowie,” says Clara.

“And how should I interfere with that, as I’ve said twenty times, when I’m safe in the Crimea?  I’ll get the licence this day, say what ye will:  and then you would not have the heart to let me spend two pounds twelve and sixpence for nothing.”

Whether the last most Caledonian argument conquered or not, Mr. Bowie got the licence, was married before breakfast the next morning, and started for the Crimea at four o’clock in the afternoon; most astonished, as he confided in the train to Sergeant MacArthur, “to see a lassie that never gave him a kind word in her life, and had not been married but barely six hours, greet and greet at his going, till she vanished away into hystericals.  They’re a very unfathomable species, Sergeant, are they women; and if they were taken out o’ man, they took the best part o’ Adam wi’ them, and left us to shift with the worse.”

But to return to Campbell.  The last week has altered him frightfully.  He is no longer the stern, self-possessed warrior which he was; he no longer even walks upright; his cheek is pale, his eye dull; his whole countenance sunken together.  And now that the excitement of anxiety is past, he draws his feet along the pavement slowly, his hands clasped behind him, his eyes fixed on the ground, as if the life was gone from out of him, and existence was a heavy weight.

“She is safe, at least, then!  One burden off my mind.  And yet had it not been better if that pure spirit had returned to Him who gave it, instead of waking again to fresh misery?  I must find that man!  Why, I have been saying so to myself for seven days past, and yet no ray of light.  Can the coward have given me a wrong address?  Yet why give me an address at all if he meant to hide from me?  Why, I have been saying that too, to myself every day for the last week?  Over and over again the same dreary round of possibilities and suspicions.  However, I must be quiet now, if I am a man.  I can hear nothing before the detective comes at two.  How to pass the weary, weary time?  For I am past thinking—­almost past praying —­though not quite, thank God!”