a right to an explanation, and equally, of course, I was
determined to have it. But the question was how to get it, and I confess
that for a long time I did not see my way. If one had been dealing with
a man it would have been very different. But when a lady with whom
you have been on terms of intimacy and friendship turns round upon you
without any cause you can assign, and tells you she desires to have no
more to do with you, it is not easy to see by what means you can force
her to a recognition of your side of the business. What made the thing
the more astonishing and bewildering was that Lady Rollinson had always
been so warm in her friendship for me. Over and over again she had
alluded to my services to her son, and she had introduced me to scores
of people as the savior of his life, magnifying a very simple incident
to such heroic proportions that she often put me to the blush about it,
and almost tempted me to wish that I had let poor Jack take his chance
without any interference of mine. To have seen a lady the day before
yesterday, to have been hailed by her for the hundredth time as her
son's preserver, to get a solemn "Not at home" thrown at you when
next you called--it was an experience entirely new, and anything but
agreeable.

If I may say so without bragging, I have been judged a fairly good
officer in my time. I can give an order, I can obey an order, I can see
that an order is obeyed; but outside the realms of discipline, and in
the common complications of life, I have never felt myself to be very
much at ease! The whole of this present business was so bewildering that
if only Lady Rollinson herself had been concerned I should have retired
from the consideration of the problem instantly. But then she stopped
my access to. Violet, and that, for a young fellow who was ardently in
love, put altogether another complexion on the affair. When I had got
over my first amazement, I sat down and wrote a note, which, in the
fervor of my feeling, bade fair to develop into a document which would
have filled, say, a column of the _Times_. But when I had written,
perhaps, a hundredth part of what I felt it in me to say, I tore up
the paper and threw its fragments into the fire. Then I started afresh,
determined to be extremely brief and business-like. Once more my
feelings got the upper hand of me, and again I covered half a dozen
closely-written pages before I discovered my mistake anew. Finally I
sat down to a pipe