’In my regiment we have a tolerable knowledge of women.  They like change, old Richie, and we must be content to let them take their twenty shillings for a sovereign.  I myself prefer the Navy to the Army; I have no right to complain.  Once she swore one thing, now she has sworn another.  We will hope the lady will stick to her choice, and not seek smaller change.  “I could not forgive coppers”; that ’s quoting your dad.  I have no wish to see the uxorious object, though you praise him.  His habit of falling under the table is middling old-fashioned; but she may like him the better, or she may cure him.  Whatever she is as a woman, she was a very nice girl to enliven the atmosphere of the switch.  I sometimes look at a portrait I have of J. R., which, I fancy, Mrs. William Bulsted has no right to demand of me; but supposing her husband thinks he has, why then I must consult my brother officers.  We want a war, old Richie, and I wish you were sitting at our mess, and not mooning about girls and women.’

I presumed from this that Heriot’s passion for Julia was extinct.  Aunt Dorothy disapproved of his tone, which I thought admirably philosophical and coxcombi-cally imitable, an expression of the sort of thing I should feel on hearing of Janet Ilchester’s nuptials.

The daring and success of that foreign adventure of mine had, with the aid of Colonel and Clara Goodwin, convinced the squire of the folly of standing between me and him I loved.  It was considered the best sign possible that he should take me down on an inspection of his various estates and his great coal-mine, and introduce me as the heir who would soon relieve him of the task.

Perhaps he thought the smell of wealth a promising cure for such fits of insubordination as I had exhibited.  My occasional absences on my own account were winked at.  On my return the squire was sour and snappish, I cheerful and complaisant; I grew cold, and he solicitous; he would drink my health with a challenge to heartiness, and I drank to him heartily and he relapsed to a fit of sulks, informing me, that in his time young men knew when they were well off, and asking me whether I was up to any young men’s villanies, had any concealed debts perchance, because, if so—­Oh! he knew the ways of youngsters, especially when they fell into bad hands:  the list of bad titles rumbled on in an underbreath like cowardly thunder:—­well, to cut the matter short, because, if so, his cheque-book was at my service; didn’t I know that, eh?  Not being immediately distressed by debt, I did not exhibit the gush of gratitude, and my sedate ‘Thank you, sir,’ confused his appeal for some sentimental show of affection.