s a lady-like
adieu--the adieu of a delicate and elegant woman, who had hardly left
her anchorage by forty to sail into the fifties.

Alas! he had her word for it, that she was not less than seventy. And,
worse, she had betrayed most melancholy signs of sourness and agedness
as soon as he had sworn himself to her fast and fixed.

'The road is open to you to retreat,' were her last words.

'My road,' he answered gallantly, 'is forward.'

He was drawing backward as he said it, and something provoked her to
smile.

CHAPTER V

It is a noble thing to say that your road is forward, and it befits a
man of battles. General Ople was too loyal a gentleman to think of any
other road. Still, albeit not gifted with imagination, he could not
avoid the feeling that he had set his face to Winter. He found himself
suddenly walking straight into the heart of Winter, and a nipping
Winter. For her ladyship had proved acutely nipping. His little
customary phrases, to which Lady Camper objected, he could see no harm
in whatever. Conversing with her in the privacy of domestic life would
never be the flowing business that it is for other men. It would demand
perpetual vigilance, hop, skip, jump, flounderings, and apologies.

This was not a pleasing prospect.

On the other hand, she was the niece of an earl. She was wealthy. She
might be an excellent friend to Elizabeth; and she could be, when she
liked, both commandingly and bewitchingly ladylike.

Good! But he was a General Officer of not more than fifty-five, in his
full vigour, and she a woman of seventy!

The prospect was bleak. It resembled an outlook on the steppes. In
point of the discipline he was to expect, he might be compared to a raw
recruit, and in his own home!

However, she was a woman of mind. One would be proud of her.

But did he know the worst of her? A dreadful presentiment, that he did
not know the worst of her, rolled an ocean of gloom upon General Ople,
striking out one solitary thought in the obscurity, namely, that he was
about to receive punishment for retiring from active service to a life
of ease at a comparatively early age, when still in marching trim. And
the shadow of the thought was, that he deserved the punishment!

He was in his garden with the dawn. Hard exercise is the best of opiates
for dismal reflections. The General discomposed his daughter by offering
to accompany her on her morning ride before breakfast. She considered
that it wo