Julia began to talk to Francis Tredethlyn, and, in spite of himself, he listened, and was fain to withdraw his gaze from the distant figure at the piano. She talked to him of a soldier’s life, jumping recklessly at conclusions, and taking it for granted that he must needs possess some latent spark of military ardour, which would blaze up into a flame under the fire of her enthusiasm. She talked to him of her father, and all those guerrilla warfares in which he had won distinction. She talked of Don Carlos, and Abd-el-Kader, and Garibaldi, whose name had not then the glorious significance which it carries with it to-day. She talked to him like a young Joan of Arc or an embryo maid of Saragosa;--and all that was brightest in Mr. Tredethlyn’s nature kindled beneath her influence. Had Francis been a stockbroker, Miss Desmond would have discoursed to him of Lionel Rothschild, or Lafitte, or Mirès; and she would have glowed with just the same enthusiasm, though her theme had been the Stock Exchange or the Bourse. But in spite of himself Mr. Tredethlyn was pleased and interested. His boyish yearning for a military career had been very nearly trampled out of him during dreary years of marchings and counter-marchings, and sword-exercise, and barrack-tyranny, with never the glimpse of a battle-field, or so much as a brief skirmish with some chance enemy. But those fresh young feelings all came back to him when Julia discoursed in low eloquent accents of her father’s foreign experiences. “Ah, that was something like a military career!” thought the young man. “It was such a life that I hoped to lead when I ran away from Landresdale; and I thought I should come back a general, with a cocked-hat and a great plume of feathers, as the gardener’s son does in the play I saw once at Falmouth.” And then Francis Tredethlyn, being by nature candid as a schoolboy newly come home for his holidays, opened his heart to Miss Desmond, and told her a good deal about his life. That dark chamber of his memory in which Susan’s image loomed through the sombre shadows he kept religiously sealed from every curious eye. But on all other subjects he was very communicative. He did not tell Julia that he had been Mr. Lowther’s body-servant; for there was something in that estate of servitude which had never been entirely pleasant to him, gallantly as he had borne himself under its serious ordeals. He had known poverty, he told Miss Desmond, in all its worst bitterness, and had seen his mother and father die broken-hearted, borne down by a load of petty debt and difficulty, when the loan of a couple of hundred pounds would have saved them.