Berkeley’s infamous treachery made my heart glow like a furnace! How deeply I repented now that, instead of succouring and remounting him, I had not left him, as his prior conduct deserved, to the chances of war and fate, and to take the place now occupied by me! How long might I be a prisoner! Of this war with the greatest empire in the world none could foresee or calculate the end. Years, perhaps, might pass, and find me still a captive. By the troops of General Canrobert, some men had been discovered who had been lost by the French on their fatal retreat from Moscow in 1813, and who had, from youth to age, been slaves in the Tartar fortresses or the Siberian mines. My blood ran cold with this idea. Oh, if such were to be my fate! If Berkeley returned to England after all, and married Louisa! And then, if this wretched Brassy Wheedleton succeeded in marrying Cora, while I was industriously quarrying for copper and assafoetida in the vicinity of that pleasant city, Tobolsk by name! But what was Cora to me? She was my cousin, and, of course, my cousin must not throw herself away and make an unequal marriage. "There are men in this world," says a female writer, "who are quite capable of being in love with two women at once." This was not at all my case; but I fear that Louisa’s cold and cutting neglect was causing me to think more than I used to do of Cora Calderwood, who I knew loved me well, and I remembered the strange episode of the spell, or mesmeric riddle, wrought by the _hakim_ Abd-el-Rasig, the surgeon of the 10th Egyptian Infantry. But to be a prisoner—the prisoner of these filthy wretches—and to be conveyed by them, like a helpless Polish exile, I knew not whither! If in boyhood, and even in infancy, I had ever a horror of study and restraint; if in later years, even regimental discipline sometimes galled me by its monotonous trammels, the reader may imagine how I writhed, how my soul revolted, at the idea of being a Russian captive, and how I longed for vengeance on Berkeley. I swore to horsewhip him in front of the line, and pistol him after! There was no extravagant length in punishment to which my fancy did not resort and my fury indulge in. No MacGregor with the dirk at his lips, swearing vengeance for Alaster of Glenstrae; no Corsican De Franchi, vowing a dreadful _vendetta_ on his foe, could harbour feelings more bitter than I did in those moments of futile anger in that poor Tartar cottage. I talked to myself wrathfully and incoherently.