Dartrey escaped to the Club, where he had a friend.  The friend was Colonel Sudley, one of the modern studious officers, not in good esteem with the authorities.  He had not forgiven Dartrey for the intemperateness which cut off a brilliant soldier from the service.  He was reduced to acknowledge, however, that there was a sparkling defence for him to reply with, in the shape of a fortune gained and where we have a Society forcing us to live up to an expensive level, very trying to a soldier’s income, a fortune gained will offer excuses for misconduct short of disloyal or illegal.  They talked of the state of the Army:  we are moving.  True, and at the last Review, the ‘march past’ was performed before a mounted generalissimo profoundly asleep, head on breast.  Our English military ‘moving’ may now be likened to Somnolency on Horseback.  ’Oh, come, no rancour,’ said the colonel; ’you know he’s a kind old boy at heart; nowhere a more affectionate man alive!’

‘So the sycophants are sure of posts!’

‘Come, I say!  He’s devoted to the Service.’

‘Invalid him, and he shall have a good epitaph.’

‘He’s not so responsible as the taxpayer.’

’There you touch home.  Mother Goose can’t imagine the need for defence until a hand’s at her feathers.’

‘What about her shrieks now and then?’

‘Indigestion of a surfeit?’

They were in a laughing wrangle when two acquaintances of the colonel’s came near.  One of them recognized Dartrey.  He changed a prickly subject to one that is generally as acceptable to the servants of Mars.  His companion said:  ‘Who is the girl out with Judith Marsett?’ He flavoured eulogies of the girl’s good looks in easy garrison English.  She was praised for sitting her horse well.  One had met her on the parade, in the afternoon, walking with Mrs. Marsett.  Colonel Sudley had seen them on horseback.  He remarked to Dartrey: 

’And by the way, you’re a clean stretch ahead of us.  I’ve seen you go by these windows, with the young lady on one side, and a rather pretty woman on the other too.’

‘Nothing is unseen in this town!’ Dartrey rejoined.

Strolling to his quarters along the breezy parade at night, he proposed to himself, that he would breathe an immediate caution to Nesta.  How had she come to know this Mrs. Marsett?  But he was more seriously thinking of what Colney Durance called ‘The Mustard Plaster’; the satirist’s phrase for warm relations with a married fair one:  and Dartrey, clear of any design to have it at his breast, was beginning to take intimations of pricks and burns.  They are an almost positive cure of inflammatory internal conditions.  They were really hard on him, who had none to be cured.

The hour was nigh midnight.  As he entered his hotel, the porter ran off to the desk in his box, and brought him a note, saying, that a lady had left it at half-past nine.  Left it?—­Then the lady could not be the alarming lady.  He was relieved.  The words of the letter were cabalistic; these, beneath underlined address: