"Tush! think of me, of my affair--I mean my mistake with Miss Lloyd."
"Neither did this Lady Estelle, now Countess of Aberconway" (I ground my teeth), "love you."
"She said she did; and what has it all come to? promises broken, a plight violated, a heart trod under foot."
"Come, come; don't be melodramatic--it's d--d absurd, and no use. Besides, there sounds the bugle for orders, and we shall have to relieve the trenches in an hour. So take another cigar ere you go."
"She never loved me--never! never! you are right, Phil."
"Did!" said I, angrily; "what do you mean now, Caradoc? I am in no mood to study paradoxes."
"I mean that she loved you to a certain extent; but not well enough to sacrifice herself and her--"
"Her little luxuries, and all that she must have lost by the tenor of her father's will and her mother's bad will, or that she should have omitted to gain, had she married you, a simple captain of the 23rd Foot, instead of this old Potter--this Earl of Aberconway."
"Pshaw, Harry, be a man, and think no more about the affair. It is as a tale that is told, a song that is sung, a bottle of tolerable wine that has become a marine."
"_L'infidelité_ du _corps_, ou l'infidelité du _c[oe]ur_, I care not now which it was; but I am done with her now and for ever," I exclaimed, with a sudden gust of rage, while clasping on my sword.
"Done--so I should think, when she is married."
"And she could cast me aside like an old garment," said I, lapsing into tenderness again; "I, to whose neck she clung as she did on that evening we parted. There must have been some trickery--some treachery, of which we are the victims!"
"Don't go on in this way, like a moonstruck boy, or, by Jove, the whole regiment will find it out; so calm yourself, for we go to the front in an hour;" and wringing my hand this kind-hearted fellow, whose offhand consolation was but ill-calculated to soothe me, left for his own tent, as he had forgotten his revolver.
I was almost stupefied by the shock. Could the story be real? I looked to the little grate (poor Evans' contrivance) where the charred remains of the _Morning Post_ still flickered in the wind. Was I the same man of an hour ago? "The plains of life were free to traverse," as an elegant female writer says, "but the sunshine of old lay across them no longer. There were roses, but they were scentless--fruits, but they were tasteless--wine, but it had lost its flavour. Well, every created being must come to an hour like this, when he feels there is nothing pleasant to the palate, or grateful to the sense, agreeable to the ear, or refreshing to the heart; when man delights him not and woman still less, and when he is sick of the dream of existence."