'Thank you, my dear fellow--thank you: but this can't be,' said he: and he had no small difficulty in getting Atkins to keep the proffered money. 'Look here,' said Acharn to a group next morning in the mess-room, 'Falconer had only his pay, and this sentence is ruin and beggary to him; I have here a cheque for eight hundred at his service, and I know that you fellows, and ever so many more of the mess, will stump up. We must do something to start him, somehow or somewhere; but how or where is beyond me, for poor Cecil is a soldier, and nothing but a soldier.' 'But where the deuce is he?' asked Fotheringhame, who with Freeport came in with genuine anxiety expressed in their faces, to state that his rooms were empty; that he had left the fortress ere tattoo was beaten last night, and Atkins knew not where he was gone. 'He has got from old Blunt, the paymaster, the last money due to him,' Fotheringhame said; 'and he has nothing with him but a small portmanteau and a brace of revolver pistols. Everything else--his uniforms, and so forth--he has, by a note, left with me.' 'Where can he have gone?' said one. 'Oh, we'll trace him somehow,' said another. But all attempts to trace him proved utterly unavailing. So he had left the regiment, silently, quietly and alone, and of course, under the peculiar circumstances, without the farewell dinner given to a departing comrade--left it without shaking the hand of anyone formally--quitting the castle in the night, unseen and unrecognised, taking only a few clothes and his pistols. 'What does he mean to do with them?' asked Freeport. 'Where can he have gone--what done with himself?' were the general surmises, while his sorrowing friends looked blankly in each other's faces, and Fotheringhame had a great yearning to see and talk with Mary Montgomerie on the subject, and was not without a lingering hope that she might be able to throw some light on the mystery that enveloped the disappearance of Falconer; but in this matter he was mistaken, for the days passed on and he was heard of no more. Evil tidings fly fast: thus on the very night of Cecil's departure, through the general, his household became aware of the fate that had befallen the unfortunate. Looking like a saint in her pure white nightdress, Mary sat on the edge of her bed, weeping bitterly after Mrs. Garth had left her, and refusing all the earnest yet commonplace comfort that Annabelle Erroll strove to give her.