She tore it impatiently open, the diamonds on her white fingers sparkling as she did so, and her delicately pencilled eyebrows were elevated as she read with aristocratic surprise and impatience:-- '"With reference to my letter of this morning about the mortgages, dear Lady Julia, take all the delay you may wish. They shall not be foreclosed till time has soothed the awful blow that has fallen upon you."' 'Blow!' exclaimed Lady Julia. 'What blow?--what can the man mean?' 'Read on, auntie--there is something more.' '"The fall of your son so gallantly in Western Africa is a circumstance to be deplored indeed by all--but more than all by those who knew him." 'Good heavens--good heavens--good heavens!' said Lady Julia thrice, in a low yet fretful voice, as if she scarcely understood the situation; 'it is all some dreadful mistake; Jerry--Jerry--a mistake, Emily. I saw nothing of it in the _Post_ or _Times_ this morning. She was trembling excessively now, and Emily's eyes were full of hot welling tears. Neither of the ladies had seen the fatal intelligence from the seat of war, for, as they all read only the fashionable intelligence, they had heeded transactions on the Gold Coast as much they did those that may be occurring in the mountains of the moon. However, to do them justice, both were thunderstruck--impressed as much as it was in their frozen nature to be--when Emily, after rushing for the morning paper, found the brief telegram or paragraph to which, no doubt, Mr. Chevenix referred: '_Coomassie in flames. Army falling back on the Gold Coast; but the rivers rising fast. Chief casualties--Captain Dalton, Rifles, severely wounded; Captain J. Wilmot, do., killed and carried off by the enemy._' The fashionable aunt and niece, at whose pleasant doors grief and sorrow seldom or never came, sat for a time as if stunned. Chevenix and his mortgages were alike forgotten; they could but think of Jerry and strive to realize the--to them--almost impossible situation, while the dull and depressing afternoon stole on. How could it be, or why was it, that Jerry, so jolly and manly--the son of such a cold and feeble-minded woman of rank and fashion, who had done her best, but failed, to spoil or pamper him--was reserved for such a fate as this! He had escaped the battle of Amoaful, the passage of the Prah, the fighting prior to the capture of Coomassie, and all the perils of death by fever and toil to perish thus, when the wretched end had been achieved and the troops must have been on their homeward way. Poor Jerry! The life of the mess and the life of Wilmothurst when at home, where, in consideration of his five feet ten inches and irreproachable moustache, he had been latterly permitted to be termed a 'son,' and not, as his mother would have wished, a 'boy.'