Alas! he had her word for it, that she was not less than seventy.  And, worse, she had betrayed most melancholy signs of sourness and agedness as soon as he had sworn himself to her fast and fixed.

‘The road is open to you to retreat,’ were her last words.

‘My road,’ he answered gallantly, ‘is forward.’

He was drawing backward as he said it, and something provoked her to smile.

CHAPTER V

It is a noble thing to say that your road is forward, and it befits a man of battles.  General Ople was too loyal a gentleman to think of any other road.  Still, albeit not gifted with imagination, he could not avoid the feeling that he had set his face to Winter.  He found himself suddenly walking straight into the heart of Winter, and a nipping Winter.  For her ladyship had proved acutely nipping.  His little customary phrases, to which Lady Camper objected, he could see no harm in whatever.  Conversing with her in the privacy of domestic life would never be the flowing business that it is for other men.  It would demand perpetual vigilance, hop, skip, jump, flounderings, and apologies.

This was not a pleasing prospect.

On the other hand, she was the niece of an earl.  She was wealthy.  She might be an excellent friend to Elizabeth; and she could be, when she liked, both commandingly and bewitchingly ladylike.

Good!  But he was a General Officer of not more than fifty-five, in his full vigour, and she a woman of seventy!

The prospect was bleak.  It resembled an outlook on the steppes.  In point of the discipline he was to expect, he might be compared to a raw recruit, and in his own home!

However, she was a woman of mind.  One would be proud of her.

But did he know the worst of her?  A dreadful presentiment, that he did not know the worst of her, rolled an ocean of gloom upon General Ople, striking out one solitary thought in the obscurity, namely, that he was about to receive punishment for retiring from active service to a life of ease at a comparatively early age, when still in marching trim.  And the shadow of the thought was, that he deserved the punishment!

He was in his garden with the dawn.  Hard exercise is the best of opiates for dismal reflections.  The General discomposed his daughter by offering to accompany her on her morning ride before breakfast.  She considered that it would fatigue him.  ‘I am not a man of eighty!’ he cried.  He could have wished he had been.

He led the way to the park, where they soon had sight of young Rolles, who checked his horse and spied them like a vedette, but, perceiving that he had been seen, came cantering, and hailing the General with hearty wonderment.

‘And what’s this the world says, General?’ said he.  ’But we all applaud your taste.  My aunt Angela was the handsomest woman of her time.’