Many signs of a speedy flitting were now seen about head-quarters. Lady Mabel sat melancholy and alone in her half-dismantled drawing-room. To-morrow, she is again to enter the desert of Alemtejo, on her way back to Lisbon. What a relief she would have found in busy preparations, even for that dull journey, now robbed of all the charms of novelty and expectation; but Moodie's industrious alacrity had deprived her even of this resource. She was ready, and, instead of busy preparations, had only sad thoughts to occupy her. About to part with that father, of whom she had known more in the last three months than in all her life before; for hitherto her's had been but a child's knowledge of him--loving him and proud of him--for the defects she began to see she viewed but as minor blemishes, foreign to his nature, and due solely to that long career in which he had known no home, nor companionship, but what he found in garrison and field; she could not conceal from herself the new career of danger he was about to run. Everything she heard indicated that he was now to march to fields where war's wild work would be urged on with a fury, and on a scale for which the last five campaigns, great as their results had been, were but the preparation. She shuddered to think that, yet a few days or weeks, and the veteran of near forty years of service may lie on his last field. This, perhaps, was not her greatest grief, but she strove to make it so, and sat gloomily and anxiously awaiting her father's return from Elvas. Presently she heard the sound of horses' hoofs clattering on the pavement of the court. Rising from her melancholy posture, she was going to meet her father, when, on opening the door, Colonel L'Isle stood before her. All the incidents of the last evening they had spent together, particularly those which he had so carefully suppressed from the narrative wrung from him, rushed upon her memory. Her folly and his generous forbearance stood facing each other. Casting her eyes on the floor, and grasping the handle of the door, to steady her tottering frame, she could only gasp out, "I expected my father." "My lord is very busy in Elvas, and so indeed was I," said L'Isle, coolly; "but, as I march at sunrise to-morrow, I felt bound to borrow a few minutes from duty to take my leave of Lady Mabel Stewart." She now recollected herself enough to let go the handle of the door, and make room for him to enter, and, by a motion of the hand, invited him to take a seat.