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The events of the next two years must be compressed into a few lines.  To the inseparable evils of war—­bloodshed and sickness—­were added the horrors of a peculiarly cruel winter.  Five-sixths of the soldiers whom England lost died from preventable diseases, and the want of proper food, clothing, and shelter.  Bullets and cholera and frost-bite did their deadly work unchecked.  The officers had at least their full share of the hardships and the fatalities.  What the Guards lost can be read on the walls of the Chapel at Wellington Barracks and in the pedigrees of Burke’s Peerage.  For all England it was a time of piercing trial, and of that hope deferred which maketh the heart sick.  No one ever knew what Vaughan endured, for he as too proud to bare his soul.  For two years he never looked at a gazette, or opened a newspaper, or heard a Ministerial announcement in the House of Commons, or listened to a conversation at his club, without the sickening apprehension that the next moment he would know that Arthur Grey was dead.  Letters from Grey reached him from time to time, but their brave cheerfulness did nothing to soothe his apprehensions.  For they were few and far between; postal communication was slow and broken, and by the time a letter reached him the hand which had penned it might be cold in death.  Yet, in spite of an apprehensive dread which had become a second nature to Philip Vaughan, the fatal news lingered.  Weeks lengthened into months, and months into two years, and yet the blow had not fallen.  It was not in Philip’s nature to “cheer up,” or “expect the best,” or “hope against hope,” or to adopt any of the cheap remedies which shallow souls enjoy and prescribe.  Nothing but certainty could give him ease, and certainty was in this case impossible.  Nervousness, restlessness, fidgetiness, increased upon him day by day.  The gossip and bustle of the House of Commons became intolerable to him.  Society he had never entered since Grey sailed for the Crimea.  As in boyhood, so again now, he felt that Nature was the only true consoler, and for weeks at a time he tried to bury himself in the wilds of Scotland or Cumberland or Cornwall, spending his whole day in solitary walks, with Wordsworth or the Imitatio for a companion, and sleeping only from physical exhaustion.

In the early part of 1856 the newspapers began to talk of peace.  Sebastopol had fallen, and Russia was said to be exhausted.  The Emperor of the French had his own reasons for withdrawing from the contest, and everything seemed to turn on the decision of Lord Palmerston.  This tantalizing vision of a swift fulfilment of his prayers seemed to Philip Vaughan even less endurable than his previous apprehensions.  To hear from hour to hour the contradictory chatter of irresponsible clubmen and M.P.’s was an insupportable affliction; so, at the beginning of the Session, he “paired” till Easter, and departed on one of his solitary rambles.  Desiring to cut himself