or I'm desired
to hold myself in readiness for a journey this very day."

"Where the deuce are they going to send you now?"

"I'm not certain of my destination. I rather suspect there are despatches
for Badajos. Just tell Mike to get breakfast, and I'll join you
immediately."

When I walked into the little room which served as my _salon_, I found
Power pacing up and down, apparently wrapped in meditation.

"I've been thinking, Charley," said he, after a pause of about ten
minutes,--"I've been thinking over our adventures in Lisbon. Devilish
strange girl that senhora! When you resigned in my favor, I took it for
granted that all difficulty was removed. Confound it! I no sooner began to
profit by your absence, in pressing my suit, than she turned short round,
treated me with marked coldness, exhibited a hundred wilful and capricious
fancies, and concluded one day by quietly confessing to me you were the
only man she cared for."

"You are not serious in all this, Fred?" said I.

"Ain't I though, by Jove! I wish to Heaven I were not! My dear Charley,
the girl is an inveterate flirt,--a decided coquette. Whether she has a
particle of heart or not, I can't say; but certainly her greatest pleasure
is to trifle with that of another. Some absurd suspicion that you were in
love with Lucy Dashwood piqued her vanity, and the anxiety to recover a
lapsing allegiance led her to suppose herself attached to you, and made her
treat all my advances with the most frigid indifference or wayward caprice;
the more provoking," continued he, with a kind of bitterness in his tone,
"as her father was disposed to take the thing favorably; and, if I must say
it, I felt devilish spooney about her myself.

"It was only two days before I left, that in a conversation with Don
Emanuel, he consented to receive my addresses to his daughter on my
becoming lieutenant-colonel. I hastened back with delight to bring her the
intelligence, and found her with a lock of hair on the book before her,
over which she was weeping. Confound me, if it was not yours! I don't
know what I said, nor what she replied; but when we parted, it was with a
perfect understanding we were never to meet again. Strange girl! She came
that evening, put her arm within mine as I was walking alone in the garden,
and half in jest, half in earnest, talked me out of all my suspicions, and
left me fifty times more in love with her than ever. Egad! I thought I used
to know something abou