As he turned to leave the court, Gerald gave another anxious, eager look at the old tower, and glanced askance at the leafy hiding-place of the packet. Another troubled sigh burst from his heart; but whatever thoughts occupied him before passing under the vaulted passage, he raised his eyes to the well-known chamber casement, which was close by. He could evidently perceive Mildred's graceful form partly ensconced behind a hanging to her window. Was she watching his departure? No. It seemed to him as if her eyes were turned in the direction of the handsome young recruit--that detested Maywood. And he? Gerald looked round once more. He felt convinced that the young sentinel's eyes were fixed upon pretty Mistress Mildred's window. It was in a high state of agitation--a new fit of raging jealousy mingling with other painful and harassing emotions, that Gerald followed the corporal and soldiers from the court. CHAPTER II. "O, 'tis your son! I know him not. I'll be no father to so vile a son." ROWLEY, (_Woman Never Vexed._) "Yet I have comfort, if by any means I get a blessing from my father's hands." _Idem._ Gerald sat with a troubled and moody air upon one of the stone benches of the low hall, which, formerly intended, perhaps, as a sort of waiting-room for the domestics of the establishment, was now used as the guard-room. Although his thoughts were not upon the objects around him, he seemed to be assiduously employed in cleaning and arranging his accoutrements--for in spite of his birth and the fortune bequeathed to him by his uncle, he was still left to fulfil the very humblest and most irksome duties of a military life. It had been part of the severe Colonel Lyle's system of education to inure his adopted son to every toil and privation that might give health and hardihood to mind as well as body; and upon the same principle, when he had enrolled the boy as a volunteer in his own troop, he had compelled him to serve as a common soldier. The colonel's strict and somewhat overwrought sense of justice, as well as his peculiar political opinions, had led him, moreover, to declare, that whatever the artificial position of his adopted son in the supposed scale of society, it should be by merit only that the young volunteer should rise from the ranks through the various grades of military distinction; and upon his deathbed he had urged his friend Seaman to pursue the same system, as long as Gerald should feel disposed to follow under him the career of arms. Although received, therefore, with certain reservations, upon an equality of footing into the family of Colonel Seaman, and in some measure looked upon as the accepted lover and future husband of the colonel's fair daughter, young Gerald found himself condemned to go through all the inferior duties and occupations of a common soldier.