pride.  I delighted to hear him.  We were happy when we were together.  And, moreover, he swore to me on his honour, in Mrs. Waddy’s presence, that he and the constable would henceforth keep an even pace.  His exuberant cheerfulness and charming playfulness were always fascinating.  His visions of our glorious future enchained me.  How it was that something precious had gone out of my life, I could not comprehend.

Julia Rippenger’s marriage with Captain Bulsted was, an agreeable distraction.  Unfortunately for my peace of mind, she went to the altar poignantly pale.  My aunt Dorothy settled the match.  She had schemed it, her silence and half-downcast look seemed to confess, for the sake of her own repose, but neither to her nor to others did that come of it.  I wrote a plain warning of the approaching catastrophe to Heriot, and received his reply after it was over, to this effect: 

’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.