A month passed, and still the promised communication from London delayed to come. The interval was spent by Brion in alternations of feverish hope and stoic resignation: now he would rise to heights of glowing expectancy, crediting his intrepid friend, in whose vocabulary the word impossible seemed to have no place, with an almost supernatural sagacity, now lament that he had ever permitted those old emotions, long precipitated and settled down, to be stirred up again to his futile misery. It was and could be nothing but an idle dream. Even were his lady, by any mad chance, as yet unwed, was it credible that a life so full, so prosperous and so courted as hers must have been during these years would have remained dedicate to that childish memory, or have come to regard it--at best, perhaps, with a little humorous tenderness--as anything but the half-forgotten idyll of a summer’s day? No, it was not credible, and it was a bitter weakness in him ever to have listened to that insidious tempter who had set re-flaming in him a long subdued fire. Out with it; cold water it; stamp it down, and this time for good and all! And then straight the revulsion would follow, and he would bemoan himself for a false knight, whose faith was not proof against the first test of separation. Had she not vowed herself his for evermore, chosen him her champion, pledged him to an eternal fidelity, declared passionately that she would kill herself rather than be made untrue to him? Base and craven, he was unworthy to be called her lover, who could so misdoubt her, lacking a shred of evidence. And so swung the pendulum, this way and that, until there came a memorable day--but well into the second month--when the longed-for despatch was actually delivered into his hands, and conveyed by him to a private place, and there eagerly broken and read. The young Captain wrote very pleasantly, in the Italian script then growing into fashion with the cultured, and in that fluent graceful style which presently came to make him notable among writers of note. He was very much occupied, it appeared. He had made his début at Court and been well received. He was full of engagements and plans and ambitions, and he discoursed at some length on the flattering attentions he had excited, seeming to linger a little complacently over this opportunity to draw his own portrait for his own behoof. Indeed, it was Raleigh, Raleigh most of the way, until the hasty postscript, and in that he referred again to the advisability of his young friend coming to enlarge his views of life in London, adding last, for all the satisfaction of his reader, these words:--