Even the swiftest physical changes are more or less imperceptible to the victim, whose body is gently numbed, and mind shadowed by a merciful cloud. The veteran felt his years, and talked much of their weight, but he alone was incapable of perceiving the extent of his ruin. And what desperate irony was there in the trick which Nature played upon him! His brain held fast to the exciting minutiæ of Plevna, and the elder services, but lost entirely his latest and crowning strategy to encompass British disaster. He had conceived and carried out a plan to force a Russo-Indian alliance against England--and had practically forgotten it. More than that, the fact that his work had been foiled by England’s counter-alliance with Japan seemed scarcely to touch his mind after his last talk with Routledge. Memory served him mightily from her treasures of old actions, but the record of his awful lone war and its dreams had been writ in water. Cardinegh gradually grew more and more content as the silence from abroad endured and his own forces failed. Many Londoners came to pay him homage; and with a single glance, the visitors understood that it were wiser to talk of El Obeid and the Chinese Gordon rather than of the new century. So the old campaigner, busy with his callers, his pipes and Latakia mixtures, his whiskies, white and red, finally came to forget for weeks at a time that the honor of his days was not his own. Only occasionally, between long periods of serenity, there would come a stirring tumult to his brain. At such times he was frightened and speechless. Nameless fears pulsated through him like the rise and fall of a tempest. Once when the old man thought he was alone, Noreen heard him mutter at the fireside: “He’s lost in India somewhere--working and brooding, the young devil,--but war will bring him out of his lair.”