"I must congratulate you most heartily, Mr. O'Connor," the colonel said. "What seemed at first a very wild and hare-brained enterprise, if you don't mind my saying so, certainly turned out a singular success. It would have seemed almost impossible that you, a young ensign, should be able to exercise any authority over a great body of mere peasants, who have everywhere shown themselves utterly insubordinate and useless under their native officers. It is nothing short of astonishing; and it is most gratifying to find that the Portuguese should, under an English officer, develop fighting powers far beyond anything with which they have been hitherto credited. What are you going to do now?" "I was intending to send my despatches on to Sir John Cradock, and wait here for orders." "I think that you had better take your despatches on yourself, Mr. O' Connor. I do not suppose that they are anything like so full as the story you have told us, which, I am sure, would be of as much interest to the general as it has been to us." "I will do so, sir, and will start this evening. My horse had three days' rest at Villa Nova, and is quite fit to travel." "You must be feeling terribly anxious about your cousin," the officer who had first told him about her remarked; "there is no saying what may have happened in Oporto after it was stormed." "I should indeed be, if she were there," Terence replied; "but I am happy to say that she is at present in Coimbra, having travelled with us under the charge of some Portuguese ladies, friends of Herrara." "You don't mean to say that you persuaded the bishop to let her out of the convent?" "Scarcely," Terence laughed, "though the bishop did unwittingly aid me." "I congratulate you on getting her out," the colonel said. "Travers was telling us the day after you left what a curious coincidence it was that the nun who threw him out a letter should turn out to be a cousin of yours. Will you tell us how you managed it?" "I don't mind telling it, sir, if all here will promise not to repeat it. The Bishop of Oporto is a somewhat formidable person, and were he to lodge a complaint against me he might get me into serious trouble, and is perfectly capable of having me stabbed some dark night in the streets of Lisbon; therefore, I think it would be as well to omit any details of the share he played in the matter. Without that the story is simple enough. Having got a boat with two men in it at the end of the street in which stood the convent, I went there in the dress of an ecclesiastic, just as the French burst into the town. The bishop had fled on the night before to the Serra Convent on the other side of the river, and I was able to produce an authority from him which satisfied the lady superior that I was the bearer of his order for her and the nuns to make for the bridge, and to cross the river at once.