"_Pardieu!_ I shall be too old to see him when he comes!" grumbled the chevalier. "Three months of glory without gold is enough for me." "You are a mercenary dog," cried St. Udo; "and I know you are an implacable devil. I have not forgotten Madam Estvan." "_Diable!_ nor I," hissed Calembours. "_Mon ami_, let us forget her. La! there she has vanished forever. But, Monsieur St. Udo, I have not been mercenary with you, have I?" "Never, chevalier." "Know you why?" "Not I, indeed." "I love you, _mon ami_, by gar! I could not betray you for any sum." "Generous man. But don't ruin your prospects for the sake of honesty, who is such a lax companion of yours that he is scarce worth such a sacrifice." "_Mon ami_, my honor is unimpeachable." "Doubtless, such as it is. By Jove! here come letters from home. One for you, Calembours, a budget for me. Huzzah!" Yes, letters had reached the army, and many a poor fellow that night forgot the anguish of his wounds and the gloom of his prospects in glad perusal of his loved one's words of affection. St. Udo, too, held an envelope in a tight hand, while he hastily scanned the other missives, eager to fling them aside and to devote himself without restraint to it. He laughed with a kind of uncaring scorn at Mr. Davenport's stiff business letter, and he frowned at good little Gay's warm-hearted persuasions to hasten back to England and settle down in Castle Brand before the year was out. He glanced with abstracted eye over the notes of astonishment, reproach, and regrets which his movements had elicited from his brother officers in the Guards, and then he put them all away, and tenderly broke the seal of the hoarded envelope. And as his darkening eye took in the meaning of its heartless words, and his heart realized the hollowness, the vanity, the treachery of the woman who had penned them, an awful scowl settled upon his brow, a demoniac sneer curled his fierce lip, and for a moment he lifted his blazing eyes to heaven, as if in derisive question of its existence when such an earth lay below. "Farewell, doting fantasy!" muttered St. Udo, tearing Lady Juliana's letter in two, and casting the fragments into the flames. "So ends my faith in goodness, truth, purity, as held by women. Once, twice, have I madly laid my life under woman's heel, to be betrayed, my foolish yearning after a better belief to be laughed at, flouted at, scorned. I might have stuck to my only deity, Fate, and let these idle dreams go. I would not then have received this last sting. I was right at first--there is no created being so traitorous, so cold, so cruel and Judas-like as a woman, except the devil who fashioned her." He scanned the polite dismissal of the Marquis of Ducie and smiled with scoffing indifference, and folding his arms, stared into the hissing embers for a long time.