How sad to be old! Hector thought of the dull life of duty, the joyless, sunless, desert waste that lay between him and the time when he might begin to care for comet port, and dilate with an elderly dandy's fatuity on the tender story of his youth. He thought of his future until he began to fancy how blessed a thing it would be if his life could end that night in the chill darkness. The engine had but to swerve a hair's breadth, as it flew along the top of a steep embankment--and lo, the end of all his sorrows! A crash, a sudden agony perhaps--unimaginable in its infinity of pain, but brief as summer lightning,--and the enigma of his existence would be solved, the troublesome thread of his life dissevered. "My poor Mary would be sorry for me," he thought, remembering the gentle betrothed waiting for him in India; "but she would fancy that I had died adoring her, and in a twelvemonth the memory of me would be a painless sorrow. Shall I make her happy by doing my duty? I have seen ruined men, whose ruin began on the day in which they sacrificed feeling on the shrine of honour. My Cecil, my Cecil, how could you be so cruel as to drive me away from you?" The image of the pale, sorrowful face that had looked at him with such heroic calmness in the moment of parting arose before him now like a reproach. He knew that she had been right. He knew that her voice had been the voice of truth and honour, the voice of his own conscience. "God help me to be worthy of the love that never can be mine, and of the gentle darling I am bound to shelter!" he thought. And then a spirit of resignation seemed to exorcise the demon despair, and he took from his pocket-book a letter written on foreign paper,--a letter in a pretty womanly hand, not too easy to decipher,--a letter from his betrothed wife, which he had read hurriedly the day before, too cruelly preoccupied to know what he was reading. The tender, trusting words were the most bitter reproaches that could assail him. His heart melted as he read the long, loving epistle by the uncertain light of the railway lamp. He could hear the voice, as he deciphered those simple girlish sentences. He could see her face--not beautiful, but very sweet and loving. He was quite alone in the carriage, and when he had replaced the letter in his pocket-book, he detached a little trinket which hung to his watch-chain, and pressed the crystal face of it to his lips. Under the crystal there was a lock of pale flaxen hair, which his own hands had selected for the shears the day he parted from his love at Simlah. "Poor Mary!" he murmured softly; "poor Mary! it will be something at least to make you happy."