But we must leave Archibald for the present, and occupy our minds with the proceedings of the other personages of this drama. An era of disaster was in store for most of them. It is curious to note how the proverb that misfortunes never come single was illustrated in the case of these people. Fate seems to have launched its thunderbolts at them all at once, as if making up for lost time; or like a playwright, who clears his stage of all secondary and superfluous characters, and leaves a free field wherein the two or three principal people may meet and work out their destiny unimpeded. Colonel Battledown fought under Wellington against Soult at Orthez; and in a charge of the French cavalry the gallant officer and genial gentleman was cut in the head by a sabre-stroke and ridden down; and when picked up after the battle he was dead. He was buried on the spot; the practice of sending the corpses of heroes and others careering over the face of the earth, in search of a spot of loam worthy to receive them, was not at that time so fashionable as it has since become. But the news of his death came home, and put his friends in mourning, and made Mistress Kate the heiress of a great property at the age of fourteen. But she was older than her years, and was generally considered to be "just the sort of person to be an heiress," whatever that may be. I suppose she was exceedingly handsome, with a proper sense of her importance, and a capacity of keeping an eye upon what she considered her interests. At the same time many actions of hers indicate that she was occasionally liable to ungovernable impulses, and that her temper was fitful and wayward. Such a woman would make a capital heroine for a modern novel; she would stand a lot of analyzing. The tender relations which had subsisted between her and Archibald were perforce broken off. What can you do with a lover who suddenly ceases to have the most distant recollection of you, who does not believe you when you tell him your name, and whose only associations with that name date seven years back and are disagreeable? Nobody can blame Kate for giving Archibald up; she would have been more than human if she could have intrusted her heart to the keeping of a half-witted wizard, whose mysterious likeness to, or connection with, a charming young gentleman rendered him only the more undesirable. Poor Kate! If she gave her heart to Archibald, and then Archibald became somebody else, what shall we say became of her heart? Must it not have been irretrievably lost, and shall we be surprised if we hereafter detect in her a tendency to heartlessness?