Lady Bell had heard him without interruption till this. “Going away—away from me, Harry?” she cried, struck heavily by the blow, “to join the ranks of war, and dare the stormy seas while these words we have spoken are yet on our lips! No, no, it cannot be.” “My love, I would I could say no and comfort you. Guess, then, what it must be for me to leave you,” he appealed to her. “Then, don’t leave me,” said Lady Bell desperately. “Oh, Harry Fane, I have been so lonely all my life, an orphan, a loveless wife—I could not help it; I could not love poor Mr. Trevor after he had forced me, a persecuted child, to marry him—till I found Sunny. You need not look disappointed. She has been the dearest, best of friends and sisters to me; but I am frighted I have misled her. I know I would leave her for my lover, my true husband. Will you leave me after this alone again? Cruel Harry! Lady Sundon was right. You are a hard, stubborn man.” “Alas! dear, how can I help it?—I, who would give my best chance of promotion—well-nigh my life, if—not the Admiralty, but the Powers above, would suffer me to remain with you only three months,” he protested passionately. “It may not be, Lady Bell—I cannot even pray for it.” “And yet you only half approve of this American war,” she reminded him pertinaciously. “That is true,” he owned; “and more than I are in the same, or a worse predicament. Lord Effingham has followed the example of Viscount Pitt, in requesting leave to retire from the service; and Captain Wilson, an Irishman, who obtained his commission by raising a hundred and thirty men off his own estate, and who has served with the greatest credit for sixteen years, has also laid down his sword.” “Then why cannot you do the same?” she implored him. “Because I do not see it to be my duty,” he said firmly. “I don’t approve of every tittle of the laws and their execution. For instance, a miserable lad of fifteen was hanged t’other day for some petty theft—it may have been no more than the filching of a sixpence, for which they tell me another wretched fellow swung at Tyburn; but that is not to say that I am not to maintain the laws which are just and good in the main. This is no time to pick holes in the services, but to build them up with our bodies and blood, and let reformation follow in due time. For anything else—even to be with you, it would be rank selfishness.” “You are too strong and wise for me,” she complained a little bitterly, averting her head. “You would not have me sacrifice honour and duty,” he pressed her in his turn, “what every true man is bound to maintain in the name of God and his fellows, whatever else he give up? Remember the line of the song you sang the last time I stood by the harpsichord in Cleveland Court:— ‘I could not love thee, dear, so well, Loved I not honour more.’ Sailors, like soldiers, belong specially to their king and country. Would you wish your sailor to stain his blue jacket?”