On hearing this Paget raised his eyebrows and smiled; but Cosmo hastily thrust his gold glass into his right eye, and glared at Quentin through it as he wheeled his chair half round, and surveyed him with cool insolence from head to foot. "Are you mad, fellow?" he asked, quietly but earnestly. "Less so than you, Colonel Crawford," replied Quentin, with suppressed passion; "I have here to show you a note from the general." "To show _me_?" "Yes, sir; because it goes from you direct to the adjutant-general for insertion in orders." Cosmo coughed, and very leisurely opened the little note which Quentin handed to him. "So, sir," said he, "so far as this scrap of paper imports--and I know Moore's writing well--he has appointed you an extra aide-de-camp?" "He has done me the honour, Colonel Crawford." "Your health, sir," said Lord Paget, frankly; "I congratulate you--won't you drink?" "You might more usefully fill up the time necessary to qualify you for a staff appointment by serving with some corps of the army." "The 25th, perhaps?" said Quentin, whose temper Cosmo's cutting coldness was rapidly bringing to a white heat. "No, sir," he replied, with one of his insolent smiles, "I did not mean our friends the Borderers." "What corps, then?" "The Belem Rangers; what do you think of them?" "Crawford!" exclaimed Lord Paget, starting with astonishment, for this imaginary corps was our general Peninsular term for all skulkers, malingerers, and others who showed the white feather, by loitering in the great hospital of Belem, near Lisbon. Quentin felt all that the studied insult implied; the blood rushed back upon his aching heart, and he grew very pale. The conviction now that his position was _different_, that Cosmo wished by deliberate insolence to provoke and destroy him, rushed upon his mind, and gave him coolness and reflection, so he said, quietly-- "I shall not report your kind suggestion to Sir John Moore; but I presume I may now withdraw?" "Sir," resumed Cosmo, starting from his chair pale with passion, as he seemed now to have a legitimate and helpless object on which to wreak his bitterness of soul--a bitterness all the deeper that it was now inflamed by wine--"sir, I refer to General Lord Paget if your bearing has not something of a mutinous sneer in it?" "My smile might, Colonel Crawford; but not bearing, be assured of that." "Sir, what the devil do you mean? Is it to bandy words with me? You hear him, Paget?" said Cosmo, incoherently, and purple alike with fury and a sense of shame at the exhibition he was making; "you hear him?" "I have no intention of insulting you," urged Quentin, anxious only to begone. "Insults are never suspected by me, but when I know they are intended, as I feel they are now. Even your presence here is an insult! Now, sir, do you understand me, and your resource--your resource--do you understand _that_--eh?"