"Major Middleton," said Quentin, bitterly, "the colonel's chilling manner, and more than you can ever know, have crushed the heart within me. I never knew my father--of my mother I have barely a memory," he continued in a broken voice--"a memory, a dream! Fate has made me early a victim--a plaything--a toy! Advise me--I feel my condition so desolate, so friendless again. What future can there be for me, if I continue to serve under him; and how can I hope for happiness, for justice, or advancement under such as he?" "Obey and suffer in silence; bear and forbear, and you will be sure to triumph in the end. 'He that tholes overcomes,' says our Scottish proverb, and the poor soldier has much to _thole_ indeed; but do your duty diligently, and you may defy any man--even the king himself." Quentin strove to take courage from the good major's words, and ultimately did so; but Middleton knew not the past of those he spoke of, and was ignorant of the secret rivalry and settled hatred that existed between them, especially in the heart of Cosmo; while Quentin, in his ignorance of military matters, knew not that the Master, if he chose to exert his powers arbitrarily, might dismiss him from the corps at once, unquestioned by any authority for doing so; and that by the stigma thus attached to his name, the chance of any other commanding officer accepting him as a volunteer would be utterly precluded; and that Cosmo did not do so was, perhaps, only by a lingering emotion of justice or of shame for what his family, and chiefly Flora Warrender and that huge bugbear "the world," would say if the story got abroad. "Better trust to the _chances_ of war," thought Cosmo, grimly, as he lay sullenly at length, smoking, on a luxurious fauteuil in his ample quarters, which were furnished with all the comforts and elegance with which a Jew broker could surround him; "a brat, a boy, a chick--a d--ned foundling! With all my conscious superiority of rank, birth, and, what are better, strength of mind and character, why do I dread this Quentin Kennedy? Why and how does he seem to be so inextricably woven up with me, my fate and fortune--it may be, with the house of Rohallion itself? Last of all, why the devil do I find him here?" (This question he almost shouted aloud as he kicked away the cushion of the fauteuil.) "Why do I dread him? _Dread_--I--shame! what delusion is this--what depression is it that his presence--the very idea of his existence--and contact bring upon me? In all this there is some strange fate--I know not what; but I shall trust to the chances of war for a riddance, and to the perilous work I shall cut out for _him_ in particular." And so he trusted; but with what success we shall see ere long. CHAPTER VII. THE DEPARTURE.