defined feeling, of having undertaken a task too difficult for
my powers, and of having engaged in a service in which I could neither
advance with hope nor retreat with honour.

After a week of this painful fluctuation, I received a note, saying that I
had but six hours before me, and that I must leave London at midnight.

I strayed involuntarily towards Devonshire House. It was one of its state
dinner-days, and the street rang with the incessant setting down of the
guests. As I stood gazing on the crowd, to prevent more uneasy thoughts,
Lafontaine stood before me. He was in uniform, and looked showily. He was
to be one of the party, and his manner had all the animation which scenes
of this order naturally excite in those with whom the world goes well. But
my countenance evidently startled him, and he attempted to offer such
consolation as was to be found in telling me that if La Comtesse was
visible, he should not fail to tell her of the noble manner in which I had
volunteered; and the happiness which I had thus secured to him and
Mariamne. "You may rely on it," said he, "that I shall make her sick of
Monsieur le Marquis and his sulky physiognomy. I shall dance with her,
shall talk to her, and you shall be the subject, as you so well deserve."

"But her marriage is inevitable," was my sole answer.

"Oh, true; inevitable! But that makes no possible difference. You cannot
marry all the women you may admire, nor they you. So, the only imaginable
resource is, to obtain their friendship, to be their _pastor fido_, their
hero, their Amadis. You then have the _entree_ of their houses, the honour
of their confidence, and the favoured seat in their boxes, till you prefer
the favoured seat at their firesides, and all grow old together."

The sound of a neighbouring church clock broke off our dialogue. He took
out his diamond watch, compared it with the time, found that to delay a
moment longer would be a solecism which might lose him a smile or be
punished with a frown; repeated a couplet on the pangs of parting with
friends; and with an embrace, in the most glowing style of Paris, bounded
across the street, and was lost in the crowd which blocked up her grace's
portal.

Thus parted the gay lieutenant and myself; he to float along the stream of
fashion in its most sparkling current--I to tread the twilight paths of
the green park in helplessness and heaviness of soul.

This interview had not the more reconciled me to life.