The Major--that is to say, Colonel Lund--stayed on after the wedding, under a sort of imputation of guardianship necessary for Sally--an imputation accepted by her in order that the old boy should not feel lonesome, far more than for any advantage to herself. She wasn't sure it did him any good though, after all, for the wedding-party (if it could be called one, it was so small), having decided that its afternoon had been completely broken into, gave itself up to dissipation, and went to see "Charley's Aunt." The old gentleman did not feel equal to this, but said if Sally told him all about it afterwards it would be just as good, and insisted on her going. He said he would be all right, and she kissed him and left him reading "Harry Lorrequer," or pretending to. The wedding-party seemed to have grown, thought the Major, in contact with the theatrical world when, on its return, it filled the summer night with sound, and made the one-eyed piebald cat who lived at The Retreat foreclose an interview with a peevish friend acrimoniously. Perhaps it was only because the laughter and the jests, the good-nights mixed with echoes of "Charley's Aunt," and reminders of appointments for the morrow, broke in so suddenly on a long seclusion that the Major seemed to hear so many voices beyond his expectation. The time had not hung heavy on his hands though--at least, no heavier than time always hangs on hands that wore gloves with no fingers near upon eighty years ago. The specific gravity of the hours varies less and less with loneliness and companionship as we draw nearer to the last one of all--the heaviest or lightest, which will it be? The old boy had been canvassing this point with another old boy, a real Major, our friend Roper, at the Hurkaru Club not long before, and, after he had read a few pages of "Harry Lorrequer" he put his spectacles in to keep the place, and fell back into a maze of recurrence and reflection. Was he honest, or was it affectation, when he said to that pursy and purple old warrior that if the doctor were to tell him he had but an hour to live he should feel greatly relieved and happy? Was his heart only pretending to laugh at the panic his old friend was stricken with at the mere mention of the word "death"--he who had in his time faced death a hundred times without a qualm? But then that was military death, and was his _business_. Death the civilian, with paragraphs in the newspapers to say "the worst" was feared, and the fever being kept down, and the system being kept up, and smells of carbolic acid and hourly bulletins--that was the thing he shrank from. Why, the Major could remember old Jack Roper at Delhi, in the Mutiny, going out in the darkness to capture those Sepoy guns--what was that place called--Ludlow Castle?--and now!...