"My cousin has left off preaching for these two years last past, sir, and is fighting for his king in North America."
"Gad's life! Then he is a better man than I took him for, when his puritan countenance and grey suit passed me in your ladyship's hall. The American campaign is no child's play. Even our sturdy Highlanders have been panic-struck at the cruelties of those Indian fiends, whose war-whoops surpass the Scottish yell as a tiger outroars an ox."
"Can your lordship tell me the latest news of the war?"
"'Tis a tale of barren victories and heavy losses. Englishmen and colonials have fought like heroes, and endured like martyrs; but I doubt the end of the campaign is still far off. The effect of last year's victory at Louisburg, at which we in England made such an uproar, was weakened by Abercromby's defeat at Ticonderoga, and by Amherst's refusal to risk an immediate attack upon Quebec. Had he taken Wolfe's advice Canada would have been ours before now; but Amherst ever erred on the side of caution. He is all for forts and block-houses, deliberation and defence--Wolfe all for the glorious hazards of attack."
"Then I doubt my cousin, Mr. Stobart, would sooner be with Wolfe than with Amherst."
"I believe he loves war, and would hate shilly-shally no less than Mr. Wolfe," Antonia answered, with a deep blush, and a sudden embarrassment.
The desperate mood in which Stobart left England had been in her mind as she spoke.
"Well, if he is with Amherst he has not seen much fighting since he left Cape Breton. Does he not write to you occasionally?"
"No, he writes only to his wife, and not often to her."
"'Tis not easy for a soldier on the march through a wilderness to despatch a letter--or even to write one," said Lord Dunkeld.
After this his lordship's boat was moored by the villa landing-stage in some hour of every day. His society was not unpleasant to Antonia in her Italian solitude. He had sworn to be her friend; and she thought she had at last discovered a man capable of friendship. She had no fear of being taken off her guard, shocked and insulted, as she had been by George Stobart. Here was no slumbering volcano, no snake in the grass, only a grave and dignified gentleman, of unimpeachable honour, and an old-fashioned piety, fully impressed by his own importance, who would fain have won her for his wife, but who, disappointed in that desire, wished to keep her for his friend.