Mohun remained in the Austrian service some time after Caroline Mannering’s death, and, by dint of good service and interest, rose rapidly; but, about eight years before I saw him, a distant relation left him the estate in the west of Ireland, where he had resided ever since, making occasional visits to the Continent, and beating up his old quarters, but rarely coming to England.

He did not mix much with the county society, such as it was; and his visitors were chiefly friends from England who had not forgotten him yet, or the military quartered in his neighborhood.

It was a dreary, desolate old house where he lived—­massive, square, and gray.  There were wooded banks and hollows just round it; but farther afield the chill, bare moorland stretched away toward the sea, broken here and there by sullen sedgy tarns.

Here he spent his monotonous existence, riding hard and drinking obstinately, but never, even in the latter case, rising into conviviality.  A long, bushy beard, and portentous mustache, grizzled, though he was scarcely past middle age, which could not conceal a deep sabre-scar, gave him a grim, sinister expression; and his voice had that brief imperious accent which is peculiar to men for many years used to give the word of command.

That worn, haggard face told a real tale.  The furrows there had been plowed by an enduring remorse, very different from that comfortable, half-complacent regret which some feel at the retrospect of their youthful fredaines.

They shake their solemn old heads as they hold themselves up to us as a warning; they sermonize with edifying gravity on the impropriety of such misdemeanors; but we can trace through all this an under-current of satisfaction tenderly fatuitous, as they go back to the days of their gipsyhood, when Plancus was consul.

I have been amused with watching these eminent but somewhat sensual Christians on such occasions, and seeing the dull eyes begin to glisten, and the lips wrinkle themselves into a fat, unpleasant smile. They have prospered since, and certainly it would be most absurd to torment themselves now about the souls and bodies which they once sacrificed to a whim.  Over those ruins and relics the River of Oblivion has rolled long ago—­let them sleep on there and take their rest.

Have we not the bright example of the prototype of this class—­the pious AEneas?  How creditable was his behavior when he looked back over the black water on the trail of flame stretching from the funeral pyre where Dido lay burning!

“He knew,” says his admiring biographer, “what the madness of women could do;” but the breeze was getting up astern, and favoring gods beckoned him on to Italy and fortune; so he sighed twice or thrice—­perhaps he wept, for the amiable hero’s tears were always ready on the shortest notice—­and then, like the captain of the Hesperus, “steered for the open sea.”