"Oh, I shall not want for an escort, believe me. Major Shirley and a dozen others will only be too happy. And now that we are to be friends from henceforward, confess that you have been wrong, cousin Basil, and that I have been right!" "Perhaps--it is the privilege of all handsome girls to be right, whatever view they take." "Did you learn this in France?" she asked, with a steady glance. "Ah!" said I, and with the thought of Jacqueline, my heart seemed to die within me; "in France I preserved your handkerchief (you remember our race on Banstead Heath), and it saved my life from a bullet at St. Malo." Her soft, peachlike cheek flushed with honest pleasure when I said this, but ere she could reply, Major Shirley--a privileged man evidently was this devil of a major, and a very handsome one to boot--came forward, saying-- "Miss Gauntlet, I beg pardon, but I have been looking for you everywhere." "Why?" asked Aurora, raising her eyebrows. "You are forgetting the hour, and that I promised your mamma to see you safely back to Tunbridge Wells betimes." "Adieu, Basil!" "Till to-morrow," I added. She kissed her gloved hand to me, and the smiling major led her away with all haste. I was happier after this interview than I had been for many a day. The kindness that the warmhearted and impulsive Aurora seemed to cherish for me gave her another and a nearer interest in my mind. Animosity died within me, and I began to think it was charming to have at least one relation who loved me for myself, and I thought of our old Scottish proverb, which says that "Blood is thicker than water." Moreover, how could she help the tenor of my crusty grandfather's odious will, or that fatality by which my cousin Tony broke his valuable neck and made her an heiress? We paraded duly for the march next day. The several troops were formed, their rolls called, and as the clock of the old market-place struck eight, the whole regiment moved off amid the cheers of the populace and the lamentations of those soldiers' wives who were left behind with their poor little ones, their treasured marriage lines, and a "begging pass" to their own parish wherever it might be--too often the usual and cruel wind-up of military matrimony. At that moment Aurora Gauntlet, mounted on her dashing grey--a pad she rode in compliment to _us_--her cheeks flushed by a long ride in the pure morning air, her skirt and plume and golden hair floating behind her, cantered up to the column, accompanied by Major Shirley in his staff uniform, and by John Trot, the valiant hero of Wandsworth Common, in very gay livery, and like the staff officer, well mounted. "I'm just in time, I find," said she, as I drew aside from my troop (which being the Light one was in the rear, as the corps was marched with the right in front) and reined up beside her.