"Unintelligible mystery of wickedness! That child was just three years old the very day it was forsaken--she abandoned it and me on its birthday! Twice had that day been observed by us--as the sweetest--the most sacred of holidays; and now that it had again come round--but I not present--for I was on foreign service--thus did she observe it--and disappeared with her paramour. It so happened that we went that day into action--and I committed her and our child to the mercy of God in fervent prayers; for love made me religious--and for their sakes I feared though I shunned not death. I lay all night among the wounded on the field of battle--and it was a severe frost. Pain kept me from sleep, but I saw them as distinctly as in a dream--the mother lying with her child in her bosom in our own bed. Was not that vision mockery enough to drive me mad? After a few weeks a letter came to me from herself--and I kissed it and pressed it to my heart; for no black seal was there--and I knew that little Lucy was alive. No meaning for a while seemed to be in the words--and then they began to blacken into ghastly characters--till at last I gathered from the horrid revelation that she was sunk in sin and shame, steeped for evermore in utmost pollution.
"A friend was with me, and I gave it to him to read--for in my anguish at first I felt no shame--and I watched his face as he read it, that I might see corroboration of the incredible truth, which continued to look like falsehood, even while it pierced my heart with agonising pangs. 'It may be a forgery,' was all he could utter--after long agitation; but the shape of each letter was too familiar to my eyes--the way in which the paper was folded--and I knew my doom was sealed. Hours must have passed, for the room grew dark--and I asked him to leave me for the night. He kissed my forehead--for we had been as brothers. I saw him next morning--dead--cut nearly in two--yet had he left a paper for me, written an hour before he fell, so filled with holiest friendship, that oh! how even in my agony I wept for him, now but a lump of cold clay and blood, and envied him at the same time a soldier's grave!
"And has the time indeed come that I can thus speak calmly of all that horror? The body was brought into my room, and it lay all day and all night close to my bed. But false was I to all our life-long friendship--and almost with indifference I looked upon the corpse. Momentary starts of affection seized me--but I cared little or nothing for the death of him, the tender and the true, the gentle and the brave, the pious and the noble-hearted; my anguish was all for her, the cruel and the faithless, dead to honour, to religion dead--dead to all the sanctities of nature--for her, and for her alone, I suffered all ghastliest agonies--nor any comfort came to me in my despair, from the conviction that she was worthless; for desperately wicked as she had shown herself to be--oh! crowding came back upon me all our hours of happiness--all her sweet smiles--all her loving looks--all her affectionate words--all her conjugal and maternal tendernesses; and the loss of all that bliss--the change of it all into strange, sudden, shameful, and everlasting misery, smote me till I swooned, and was delivered up to a trance in which the rueful reality was mixed up with phantasms more horrible than man's mind can suffer out of the hell of sleep!