look seemed to confess, for the sake of
her own repose, but neither to her nor to others did that come of it.
I wrote a plain warning of the approaching catastrophe to Heriot, and
received his reply after it was over, to this effect:

'In my regiment we have a tolerable knowledge of women. They like
change, old Richie, and we must be content to let them take their twenty
shillings for a sovereign. I myself prefer the Navy to the Army; I
have no right to complain. Once she swore one thing, now she has sworn
another. We will hope the lady will stick to her choice, and not seek
smaller change. "I could not forgive coppers"; that 's quoting your dad.
I have no wish to see the uxorious object, though you praise him. His
habit of falling under the table is middling old-fashioned; but she may
like him the better, or she may cure him. Whatever she is as a woman,
she was a very nice girl to enliven the atmosphere of the switch. I
sometimes look at a portrait I have of J. R., which, I fancy, Mrs.
William Bulsted has no right to demand of me; but supposing her husband
thinks he has, why then I must consult my brother officers. We want
a war, old Richie, and I wish you were sitting at our mess, and not
mooning about girls and women.'

I presumed from this that Heriot's passion for Julia was extinct. Aunt
Dorothy disapproved of his tone, which I thought admirably philosophical
and coxcombi-cally imitable, an expression of the sort of thing I should
feel on hearing of Janet Ilchester's nuptials.

The daring and success of that foreign adventure of mine had, with the
aid of Colonel and Clara Goodwin, convinced the squire of the folly of
standing between me and him I loved. It was considered the best sign
possible that he should take me down on an inspection of his various
estates and his great coal-mine, and introduce me as the heir who would
soon relieve him of the task.

Perhaps he thought the smell of wealth a promising cure for such fits
of insubordination as I had exhibited. My occasional absences on my own
account were winked at. On my return the squire was sour and snappish, I
cheerful and complaisant; I grew cold, and he solicitous; he would drink
my health with a challenge to heartiness, and I drank to him heartily
and he relapsed to a fit of sulks, informing me, that in his time young
men knew when they were well off, and asking me whether I was up to any
young men's villanies, had any concealed debts perchance, because,