"It can no longer be mine." "Why?" "For reasons that I cannot tell--even to you." "Ah, pardon me; but what do you mean to do?" "Soldier still--of course." "But where?" "In India." "In India!" she exclaimed, with a depth of interest that made Roland's heart beat wildly; "oh, how far, far away!" "Far away from you;--oh, Miss Darnel--Aurelia!" His heart was rushing to his head. At that moment a visitor, Colonel Smash, of U.S. army, was announced, and Roland withdrew, leaving unsaid all that he ought to have said--that she expected him to say, and what he would have said, but for the secret of that accursed cabinet of Scindia. Could she have looked into his heart and read his thoughts, through the window which Vulcan wished had been placed in every human breast! Both Aurelia and Madame Darnel had a right to expect something more to develop itself from the visit of Roland; but he felt himself a very craven, and retired, leaving her with the most absurd of her many admirers, Colonel Ithurial Smash, a long-legged, hard-featured, and most ungainly New Yorker, whose rivalry was too contemptible for Roland's consideration, though he did marvel whether one could "possibly parade a fellow," for interrupting one's conversation with his cousin--for in this degree of relationship the "Colonel" somehow stood to Aurelia Darnel. CHAPTER VI. COLONEL SMASH. After this, many days elapsed, and Roland, having ever before him the last crushing communication of Messrs. Hook and Crook, never went near the Chateau de St. Eustache, much to the surprise of Logan, whose mind was sorely exercised on that subject, and on some new and unwonted peculiarities of temper and system which he discovered in his old friend and once jolly comrade. Aurelia, too, felt some surprise at his protracted absence, and that she never saw him at the promenades and public places where she had been wont to see him before. She was thinking could he have fallen in love with some one else--she always thought he loved _her_--some one in Scotland where he had been? If so, what business had he to come to her and talk, and act, and look, too, as if he were free and fetterless? Could he have been playing with her, making a fool of her all along? How coldly and quietly he had talked about going to India, too. Ah no! could she have seen Roland Ruthven at that very time! He was kissing, looking at, smoothing out, and caressing a tiny kid glove, which he had begged from her at that very ball where they first met, on the 5th of August--the fatal day of the Ruthvens, as Elspat Gorm was wont to call it. "Roland, old fellow," said Logan, dropping into his quarters one evening when he was dressing for mess, "what is up--you look like the ace of spades? Never saw a fellow so changed in all my life."