“Gentlemen,” said I, folding up the letter for concealment and preservation, “I am very sorry to have brought you out here for nothing.  I must make some other kind of reparation to you, Captain Falconer.  I can’t fight you.”

There was a moment’s pause; during which Lieutenant Chubb looked from me to his principal, with a mirthful grin, as much as to say I was a proven coward after all my swagger.  But the captain merely replied: 

“Oh, let the matter rest as it is, then.  I’m sorry I had to disappoint a lady, to come out here on a fool’s errand, that’s all.”

He made that speech with intention, I’m sure, by way of revenge upon me, though doubtless ’twas true enough; for he must have known how it would sting a man who thought kindly of Madge Faringfield.  It was the first cutting thing I had ever heard him say; it showed that he was no longer unwilling to antagonise me; it proved that he, too, could throw off the gentleman when he chose:  and it made him no longer difficult for me to hate.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Philip Comes at Last to London.

A human life will drone along uneventfully for years with scarce a perceptible progress, retrogression, or change; and then suddenly, with a few leaps, will cover more of alteration and event in a week than it has passed through in a decade.  So will the critical occurrences of a day fill chapters, after those of a year have failed to yield more material than will eke out a paragraph.  Experience proceeds by fits and starts.  Only in fiction does a career run in an unbroken line of adventures or memorable incidents.

The personal life of Philip Winwood, as distinguished from his military career, which had no difference from that of other commanders of rebel partisan horse, and which needs no record at my hands, was marked by no conspicuous event from the night when he learned and defeated Madge’s plot, to the end of the war.  The news of her departure, and of Tom’s death, came to him with a fresh shock, it is true, but they only settled him deeper in the groove of sorrow, and in the resolution to pay full retribution where it was due.

He had no pusillanimous notion of the unworthiness of revenge.  He believed retaliation, when complete and inflicted without cost or injury to the giver, to be a most logical and fitting thing.  But he knew that revenge is a two-edged weapon, and that it must be wielded carefully, so as not to cause self-damage.  He required, too, that it should be wielded in open and honourable manner; and in that manner he was resolved to use it upon Captain Falconer.  As for Madge, I believe he forgave her from the first, holding her “more in sorrow than in anger,” and pitying rather than reproaching.