another shrine, adoring quite another deity, and adoring it, as he was constrained to confess to himself, with a sudden, vehement devotion, characteristic rather of boyish enthusiasm than of the mature sobriety of middle age. Anyhow, as Sutton rode into the yard of the little inn where dinner awaited him, he wished, for the first time in his life, that the campaign was well over and himself safe back again at the pacific pursuits on which duty was just now sternly calling him to turn his back. Here he found the Agent and Desvoeux, who had been busy all the afternoon with despatches and were waiting now for the moonlight to allow them to get forward on their journey. Desvoeux, as was always the case in times of difficulty, had risen to the occasion and fully justified the confidence of those who placed a seeming fop in a responsible position. He had been working all day like a slave, and he was now dining like an Epicurean, and in higher spirits than Epicureans mostly are. The Agent, who kept him in thorough order and got an inordinate amount of first-rate work out of him at times, rewarded him by a generous confidence and a liberty of speech in private, which no other subordinate enjoyed. A jaded, weary official, with an uncomfortably lively scepticism as to the usefulness of himself and his system to the world, forced into all sorts of new and uncomfortable conditions, could not but be grateful to an assistant whose spirits, like Desvoeux's, were always in inverse ratio to the darkness of surrounding things, whose cynicism was always amusing, and whose observations on the world around and above him, if frequently somewhat impertinent, were never without good sense and insight. At present both Desvoeux and his master were abusing Blunt over an excellent bottle of champagne. Sutton was soon installed at the banquet, which presently began _da capo_ on his account. 'We shall have no moon till eleven,' said the Agent; 'so Desvoeux and I are amusing ourselves by inveighing against poor Blunt for the kettle of fish he has set a-boiling down below; and which you and your troopers, Sutton, must dispose of as best you can. It is another instance of that bane of the service--zeal. Tallyrand was quite right to insist on no one having any of it.' 'Yes, sir,' said Desvoeux; 'Enthusiasm, Experience and Principle may be said to be the three rocks on which we get shipwrecked--enthusiasm, because it gives us affairs like this of Blunt's; experience----'