He read it hastily, and angrily threw it on the floor.  He thought himself an ill-used man!  “Be in Alcantara by ten to-morrow!  I will do no such thing!  I have been in the saddle for weeks.  My horses are worn out,” (he chose to forget a fresh horse in the stable.) “Up late last night and worried all day about affairs over which I have no control, and fellows who will fail us at need.  Sir Rowland must wait till dinner time to-morrow for news of these dilatory Spaniards.  If he has to deal much more with them, it will be a useful lesson to learn to wait.”

He now went to his chamber to dress in order to attend Lady Mabel.  When he returned to his parlor, seeing Sir Rowland’s insulted despatch still lying on the floor, he condescended to pick it up and stow it away in his pocket with his notes on the state of the Andalusian reserve and the garrison of Badajoz, and then rode off in the happiest mood to head-quarters.  But when he dismounted there, his conscience pricked him.  An ambitious soldier, zealous in the cause for which he fought, he, not long since, would have felt one moment’s forgetfulness, or the slightest neglect of the service, to be treason against his own nature.  He now turned back from the door to bid the groom leave his own horse in Elvas, and take the fresh horse on to the little town of Albuquerque, and expect him at the posada there before the dawn of day.  Having, by this provision for riding post, quieted the compunctious visitings of conscience, he entered the house.

Lady Mabel kept him waiting some time, purposely, for delay was now her policy.  Soon, however, he heard her talking in the next room, and the abrupt and crabbed tones of the voice which answered her, betrayed Moodie in one of his objecting and protesting moods.  Lady Mabel was giving sundry injunctions to an unwilling agent.  At length the old Scotch grieve, like one of his own ill-conditioned steers, would neither lead nor drive; for when she bid him to put the clock back an hour, he flatly refused, calling it acting a lie, as the wily Gibeonites did to Joshua.

“Or as Jacob and Rebecca did to blind old Isaac,” Lady Mabel suggested; but even the example of the patriarch could not move him, and Lady Mabel had to make time move backward with her own hand.

At length she entered the room radiant with beauty and with smiles, for Moodie’s obstinacy had not ruffled her in the least.  She was so sorry to have kept Colonel L’Isle waiting, and so much afraid he would have to wait a while longer, as the old Lisbon coach and the mules, with their harness, were not put together so speedily, as the London turn-out of a fashionable lady.  “I am to blame,” she continued, “for not having looked to it before, for Antonio Lobo, my impromptu postillion, is less skilled in the management of my vehicle, than of the olive trees among which he has lived until he has taken the color of their ripe fruit.”

To fill up the time she now asked L’Isle’s opinion of her dress, seeing him eye it with some surprise.  Turning gracefully about and showing it off to him from different points of view, she told him that, as a last compliment to her Elvas friends, she had, for once, adopted their costume.