doubts.

The usual ceremony of relieving guard was gone through; but although the
words of order were few, these few words were communicated by Gerald in a
brief angry tone, and received by the other young soldier with a cold
frowning air. Between the two young men there appeared to exist feelings
of an instinctive repulsion.

As he turned to leave the court, Gerald gave another anxious, eager look
at the old tower, and glanced askance at the leafy hiding-place of the
packet. Another troubled sigh burst from his heart; but whatever thoughts
occupied him before passing under the vaulted passage, he raised his eyes
to the well-known chamber casement, which was close by. He could evidently
perceive Mildred's graceful form partly ensconced behind a hanging to her
window. Was she watching his departure? No. It seemed to him as if her
eyes were turned in the direction of the handsome young recruit--that
detested Maywood. And he? Gerald looked round once more. He felt convinced
that the young sentinel's eyes were fixed upon pretty Mistress Mildred's
window. It was in a high state of agitation--a new fit of raging jealousy
mingling with other painful and harassing emotions, that Gerald followed
the corporal and soldiers from the court.

CHAPTER II.

"O, 'tis your son!
I know him not.
I'll be no father to so vile a son."

ROWLEY, (_Woman Never Vexed._)

"Yet I have comfort, if by any means
I get a blessing from my father's hands."

_Idem._

Gerald sat with a troubled and moody air upon one of the stone benches of
the low hall, which, formerly intended, perhaps, as a sort of waiting-room
for the domestics of the establishment, was now used as the guard-room.
Although his thoughts were not upon the objects around him, he seemed to
be assiduously employed in cleaning and arranging his accoutrements--for
in spite of his birth and the fortune bequeathed to him by his uncle, he
was still left to fulfil the very humblest and most irksome duties of a
military life.

It had been part of the severe Colonel Lyle's system of education to inure
his adopted son to every toil and privation that might give health and
hardihood to mind as well as body; and upon the same principle, when he
had enrolled the boy as a volunteer in his own troop, he had compelled him
to serve as a common soldier. The colonel's strict and somewhat
overwrought sense of