"And has the time indeed come that I can thus speak calmly of all that horror? The body was brought into my room, and it lay all day and all night close to my bed. But false was I to all our life-long friendship--and almost with indifference I looked upon the corpse. Momentary starts of affection seized me--but I cared little or nothing for the death of him, the tender and the true, the gentle and the brave, the pious and the noble-hearted; my anguish was all for her, the cruel and the faithless, dead to honour, to religion dead--dead to all the sanctities of nature--for her, and for her alone, I suffered all ghastliest agonies--nor any comfort came to me in my despair, from the conviction that she was worthless; for desperately wicked as she had shown herself to be--oh! crowding came back upon me all our hours of happiness--all her sweet smiles--all her loving looks--all her affectionate words--all her conjugal and maternal tendernesses; and the loss of all that bliss--the change of it all into strange, sudden, shameful, and everlasting misery, smote me till I swooned, and was delivered up to a trance in which the rueful reality was mixed up with phantasms more horrible than man's mind can suffer out of the hell of sleep! "Wretched coward that I was to outlive that night! But my mind was weak from great loss of blood--and the blow so stunned me that I had not strength of resolution to die. I might have torn off the bandages--for nobody watched me--and my wounds were thought mortal. But the love of life had not welled out with all those vital streams; and as I began to recover, another passion took possession of me--and I vowed that there should be atonement and revenge. I was not obscure. My dishonour was known through the whole army. Not a tent--not a hut--in which my name was not bandied about--a jest in the mouths of profligate poltroons--pronounced with pity by the compassionate brave. I had commanded my men with pride. No need had I ever had to be ashamed when I looked on our colours; but no wretch led out to execution for desertion or cowardice ever shrunk from the sun, and from the sight of human faces arrayed around him, with more shame and horror than did I when, on my way to a transport, I came suddenly on my own corps, marching to music as if they were taking up a position in the line of battle--as they had often done with me at their head--all sternly silent before an approaching storm of fire. What brought them there? To do me honour! Me, smeared with infamy, and ashamed to lift my eyes from the mire. Honour had been the idol I worshipped--alas! too, too passionately far--and now I lay in my litter like a slave sold to stripes--and heard as if a legion of demons were mocking me with loud and long huzzas; and then a confused murmur of blessings on our noble commander, so they called me--me, despicable in my own esteem--scorned, insulted, forsaken--me, who could not bind to mine the bosom that for years had touched it--a