So the guilty pair went their ways and left their consciences behind them. CHAPTER II. If there were in the wide world a good-looking, stalwart young man of twenty-three for whom an unexpected meeting in romantic and picturesque circumstances with a beautiful woman could be expected to be without danger, George Lauriston might well have been the man. Not that he was a prig; not that the highly inflammable substance, a soldier’s heart, was in his case consuming for some other lady. But he was not quite in the position, and not at all in the mind of the majority of his comrades of his own age. He was the poor son of a brilliant but unlucky soldier who had died bravely in his first campaign; and he was so eaten up with the ambition to distinguish himself, and to render famous the name which his father had already made honourable, that all other passions merely simmered in him while that one boiled and seethed on the fires of an intense and ardent nature that as yet had shown but little of its powers. That he had a keen intellect was well known; it shone out of his brown eyes, and gave interest to a face, the chief characteristic of which was a certain, frank, boyish brightness. A good face, an honest face; none but the better qualities of the nature it illustrated showing through it yet, no sensual curves to spoil the firm lines of the mouth, which, for the rest, was more than half hidden by a moustache some shades lighter than the brown hair, which had a very pretty hero-like curl about the temples. To the rare eyes which read more than superficial signs in a man’s countenance, there might perhaps have been something suggestive in the fact, unnoticeable to any but the very keenest observer, and therefore unknown even by most of his intimate friends, that the two sides of his face did not exactly correspond in a single feature. One nostril was somewhat larger and higher than the other; the left corner of the mouth scarcely level with the right; and the same with the eyes and eyebrows, the difference being in all cases very slight but none the less real. It might have been argued with some point that a man whose face showed these irregularities was just as likely to be guilty of startling inconsistencies as a man with a heavy jaw is to turn out a brute, or one with a receding chin to prove a soft and yielding fool. So far, however, George Lauriston could boast a fair record, having earned his universally high character as much by the heartiness and spirit with which he threw himself into all games and sports, as by the energy and devotion he showed in the discharge of the various duties of his career.