nd plenty of
time to spur up my lord's own servants, and push forward their
preparations. Busy as Lord Strathern was, he failed not to remark
Moodie's prompt, methodical, and energetic labors. He pronounced him
the prince of quartermasters, and a heavy loss to the army. "The old
fellow would evacuate a fortress, or conduct a retreat with the
precision of a parade, and not leave even a dropped cartridge to the
enemy behind him." In fact, had Marshal Soult sworn to sack Elvas
to-morrow, Moodie could not have been more on the alert in getting
Lady Mabel ready to leave it. Not that he was afraid of a
Frenchman--he would willingly have faced him, and made his mark upon
him--but when all might be lost, and nothing gained by staying,
Moodie, like Xenophon, was proving his soldiership by a speedy, yet
orderly retreat. He was carrying off Lady Mabel, _via_ the villages of
Lisbon and London, to his stronghold of Craggy-side, where, he
trusted, she would be safe from L'Isle and Popery.

Many signs of a speedy flitting were now seen about head-quarters.
Lady Mabel sat melancholy and alone in her half-dismantled
drawing-room. To-morrow, she is again to enter the desert of Alemtejo,
on her way back to Lisbon. What a relief she would have found in busy
preparations, even for that dull journey, now robbed of all the charms
of novelty and expectation; but Moodie's industrious alacrity had
deprived her even of this resource. She was ready, and, instead of
busy preparations, had only sad thoughts to occupy her. About to part
with that father, of whom she had known more in the last three months
than in all her life before; for hitherto her's had been but a child's
knowledge of him--loving him and proud of him--for the defects she
began to see she viewed but as minor blemishes, foreign to his nature,
and due solely to that long career in which he had known no home, nor
companionship, but what he found in garrison and field; she could not
conceal from herself the new career of danger he was about to
run. Everything she heard indicated that he was now to march to fields
where war's wild work would be urged on with a fury, and on a scale
for which the last five campaigns, great as their results had been,
were but the preparation. She shuddered to think that, yet a few days
or weeks, and the veteran of near forty years of service may lie on
his last field. This, perhaps, was not her greatest grief, but she
strove to make it so, and sat gloomil