"Known only to the Daveneys, their immediate friends, and myself!" Sir John Manvers stopped from time to time in his circumscribed walk, and read and re-read these odious and degrading words frequently during the night, and as the sun poured his beams athwart the sickly lamp, he held the letter to the flame, and finally casting the blackened paper to the ground, crushed the ashes beneath his boot. "So so--I am a gazing-stock for the Daveneys and their immediate friends,--that soft-voiced, cautious missionary, that idler Ormsby, that Frankfort, who writes such d--d laconic memoranda, that are in reality orders! I am a mark for bad men's scorn and good men's pity. _Good_ men! What constitutes a good man? Is he one whom the devil has not been _permitted_ to tempt?--_permitted_ to tempt, mark that! "That one fatal error of my life. Was it my misfortune or my crime that the citadel of my heart was weak, and that I could not drive out the Tempter, who had been permitted to besiege and enter it? "I am utterly confounded--which way shall I turn?--There seems but one remedy." He took up a pistol which lay, loaded only with powder, on the table. With this he was wont to summon his valet, who occupied a tent too distant to distinguish any other call. Had it been loaded with ball, he might have lifted it to his head. He cast it impatiently from him; the trigger caught in his watch-chain, and the weapon went off. The valet, who stood with his master's coffee at hand, entered the marquee almost immediately. The General instinctively turned his back upon his servant; the latter, accustomed to execute his duties without observation and without, thanks, placed the little tray, with its small silver service, on the table, and stood waiting further orders. "You may go," said the General, in his usual voice; and the valet retired. It is indeed strange how a mind torn for hours by conflicting emotions can in a moment, when pressed by necessity, bring itself to act in the most trifling occurrences of life; reaction once produced, the brain partially recovers its tone. The morning light, the sound of the stirring _reveille_, its bugle echoes answering each other from kloof to kloof, the rattle of accoutrements, and the roll of the martial drums, with their shrill accompaniments, the fifes, awoke the little world around.