"When he was well enough to leave his room he found that she had left Calcutta for a visit to some friends at Simlah. She wanted change of air, her brother said, and it might be some months before she would return. My friend's impulsive nature would not suffer him to wait so long. How base a scoundrel he must have been if his heart had not overflowed with gratitude to the friend who had saved his life, the tender-hearted girl who had watched him in his danger! You will not wonder when I tell you that his first impulse was to ask his friend to become his brother, his gentle nurse to take the sacred name of wife. What return could he offer for so much devotion, except the devotion of his own life? And his heart was so free, Lady Cecil, that he offered it as freely as if it had been a handful of gold which he had no need of. The civilian acted nobly, declining to accept any pledge in his sister's name. I say nobly, because the soldier was a richer man by twenty times than his friend, and had been the first prize in the Anglo-Indian matrimonial market. The soldier waited only till he was strong enough to bear the jolting of a palanquin before he went to Simlah. He found his nurse looking pale and anxious: little improved by change of air or scene. He came upon her unexpectedly; and the one look which he saw in her face, as she recognised him, assured him that he had not made the senseless blunder of a coxcomb when he had fancied himself beloved. He stayed in the hill country for a fortnight, and he went back to his regiment the promised husband of as pure and true-hearted a woman as ever lived. I bear tribute to her goodness, Lady Cecil, standing by your side, here upon this English shore, so many hundred miles away. God bless her!" He lifted his hat as he pronounced the blessing; and looking at him with sad, earnest eyes, Cecil saw that his were dim with tears. "Oh, Cecil, Cecil!" he said, "I haven't finished my story yet. Can you guess what happened when the soldier came home, and chance threw him into intimate association with another woman? Unhappily, it is such an old story. Ah! then, and then only, his heart throbbed into sudden life. Ah! then only he found how wide a difference there is between a grateful impulse of the mind and an absorbing passion of the heart. Careless and inconsiderate in all things, he abandoned himself to the charm of an association whose peril he never calculated; and he awoke one day, like a man who had been dreaming pleasant dreams upon the edge of a precipice, to discover his danger. I cannot tell you how bitter that awakening was. There is an old Greek fancy--too foolish for me to tell you--which explains a perfect love as the reunion of two beings who at first were one, but who, separated by an angry deity, have wandered blindly through the universe in search of one another. But sometimes it happens, Lady Cecil, that the half-soul finds its other half too late!