“She seems to retain yet the air and manner, and, I trust, the modesty and purity of mind that should grace such beauty.  But how will it be six months hence?  Her situation is absolutely improper.  Lord Strathern has shown himself no more fit to bring up such a daughter, or even to take charge of her, after some fitter person has brought her up, than he is to say mass.”  For here L’Isle’s eye fell on a fat priest, toiling up the hill beside him.  “Though he may be as fit for that as some of these gentry.  No more fit,” continued he, struggling after another simile, “than for a professor of Greek literature.”  For during his late solitude his thoughts had often wandered back to his old haunts, before he had broken off a promising career at Oxford, to join the first British expedition that had come out to Portugal nearly five years ago.

“I am sorry for her, upon my soul I am.  She would make so fine a woman in proper hands!  I wonder if some remedy cannot be found against the effects of her father’s folly—­his forgetfulness of what is due to maiden delicacy and the privacies of domestic life!”

L’Isle was still meditating on this interesting subject when he dismounted at his own quarters, one of the best houses on the praca, or public square of Elvas.

Lady Mabel was right in supposing that family interest had something to do with putting L’Isle at the head of a regiment when just twenty-four.  Such instances have been common enough in the British service—­and not rare in others, in all ages of the world.  Family interest, or something very like it, put Alexander, at the age of twenty, at the head of an army with which he went on conquering to the end of his short life.  The same influence put Hannibal, at twenty-seven, at the head of an army with which he continued for seventeen years to shake the foundations of Rome.  Family interest thrust forward such men as Edward the Black Prince, the fifth Harry of England, and the fourth Henri of France.  This, too, thrust forward the great Conde to offer to France the first fruits of his heroism, when victor at Rocroi, at twenty-two.  So, too, with Gustavus Adolphus, Turenne, Eugene of Savoy, and Frederick the Great.  Family interest, not of the most creditable kind, turned the courtier Churchill into the conquering Marlborough; and his nephew, the gallant young Berwick, found that being, somewhat irregularly, the son of an English king, helped him much in obtaining the command of the armies of France.  Just at this time the son of an earl, and the brother of a governor-general of India, pushed on by family interest, was proving himself not unfit to direct the efforts of the British arms.  It is curious to see in these, and many an instance more in military history, how aptly family interest has come into play.  It is likely that these men were not the mere creatures of accident, but had each merits of his own, and in spite of whispered insinuations, so had Lieutenant-Colonel L’Isle, though nephew and heir to an earl.  Having chosen his profession, he followed it laboriously and gallantly, as if he had not been heir to an acre—­but bore his fortunes on the point of his sword.