but to noble and even royal lives.  I now felt the whole truth of Hamlet’s description—­the ways of the world “flat, stale, and unprofitable;” the face of nature gloomy; the sky a “congregation of pestilent vapours.”  It was not the hazard of life; exposed, as it might be, in the midst of scenes of which the horrors were daily deepening; it was a general undefined feeling, of having undertaken a task too difficult for my powers, and of having engaged in a service in which I could neither advance with hope nor retreat with honour.

After a week of this painful fluctuation, I received a note, saying that I had but six hours before me, and that I must leave London at midnight.

I strayed involuntarily towards Devonshire House.  It was one of its state dinner-days, and the street rang with the incessant setting down of the guests.  As I stood gazing on the crowd, to prevent more uneasy thoughts, Lafontaine stood before me.  He was in uniform, and looked showily.  He was to be one of the party, and his manner had all the animation which scenes of this order naturally excite in those with whom the world goes well.  But my countenance evidently startled him, and he attempted to offer such consolation as was to be found in telling me that if La Comtesse was visible, he should not fail to tell her of the noble manner in which I had volunteered; and the happiness which I had thus secured to him and Mariamne.  “You may rely on it,” said he, “that I shall make her sick of Monsieur le Marquis and his sulky physiognomy.  I shall dance with her, shall talk to her, and you shall be the subject, as you so well deserve.”

“But her marriage is inevitable,” was my sole answer.

“Oh, true; inevitable!  But that makes no possible difference.  You cannot marry all the women you may admire, nor they you.  So, the only imaginable resource is, to obtain their friendship, to be their pastor fido, their hero, their Amadis.  You then have the entree of their houses, the honour of their confidence, and the favoured seat in their boxes, till you prefer the favoured seat at their firesides, and all grow old together.”

The sound of a neighbouring church clock broke off our dialogue.  He took out his diamond watch, compared it with the time, found that to delay a moment longer would be a solecism which might lose him a smile or be punished with a frown; repeated a couplet on the pangs of parting with friends; and with an embrace, in the most glowing style of Paris, bounded across the street, and was lost in the crowd which blocked up her grace’s portal.

Thus parted the gay lieutenant and myself; he to float along the stream of fashion in its most sparkling current—­I to tread the twilight paths of the green park in helplessness and heaviness of soul.