g daylight without and the lamplight within contended rather
mournfully for mastery, while a wild, southeasterly wind, breaking in
gusts against the house front, sobbed at the casements and made a loose
pane, here and there, click and rattle.

And it was in the midst of a notably heavy gust, when dessert had been
served and the servants had left the room, that Captain Ormiston leaned
across the table and addressed his sister-in-law.

The young soldier had been somewhat gloomy and silent during dinner. He
was vaguely anxious about Lady Calmady. The news of Mrs. St. Quentin
was critical, and he cherished a very true affection for his
great-aunt. Had she not been his confidant ever since his first term at
Eton? Had she not, moreover, helped him on several occasions when
creditors displayed an incomprehensibly foolish pertinacity regarding
payment for goods supplied? He was burdened, too, by a prospective
sense of his own uncommon righteousness. For, during the past five
months, while he had been on leave at Brockhurst, assisting Katherine
to master the details of the very various business of the estate,
Ormiston had revised his position and decided on heroic measures of
reform. He would rid himself of debt, forswear expensive London habits,
and those many pleasant iniquities which every great city offers
liberally to such handsome, fine gentlemen as himself. He actually
proposed, just so soon as Katherine could conveniently spare him, to
decline from the splendid inactivity of the Guards, upon the hard work
of some line regiment under orders for foreign service. Ormiston was
quite affected by contemplation of his own good resolutions. He
appeared to himself in a really pathetic light. He would like to have
told Mary Cathcart all about it and have claimed her sympathy and
admiration. But then, she was just precisely the person he could not
tell, until the said resolutions had, in a degree at all events, passed
into accomplished fact! For--as not infrequently happens--it was not so
much a case of being off with the old love before being on with the
new; as being off with the intermediate loves, before being on with the
old one again. To announce his estimable future, was, by implication at
all events, to confess a not wholly estimable past. And so Roger
Ormiston, sitting that night at dinner beside the object of his best
and most honest affections, proved but poor company; and roused
himself, not without effort, to say to h