they
stamped a radiant day in his mind, beyond the resources of rhetoric to
have done it equally.

This was the day of Captain Con's crossing the Rubicon between the
secret of his happiness and a Parliamentary career.

CHAPTER XVIII. CAPTAIN CON'S LETTER

Women may be able to tell you why the nursing of a military invalid
awakens tenderer anxieties in their bosoms than those called forth by
the drab civilian. If we are under sentence of death we are all of us
pathetic of course; but stretched upon the debateable couch of sickness
we are not so touching as the coloured coat: it has the distinction
belonging to colour. It smites a deeper nerve, or more than one; and
this, too, where there is no imaginary subjection to the charms of
military glory, in minds to which the game of war is lurid as the plumes
of the arch-slayer.

Jane Mattock assisting Mrs. Adister O'Donnell to restore Captain Philip
was very singularly affected, like a person shut off on a sudden
from her former theories and feelings. Theoretically she despised the
soldier's work as much as she shrank abhorrently from bloodshed. She
regarded him and his trappings as an ensign of our old barbarism, and
could peruse platitudes upon that theme with enthusiasm. The soldier
personally, she was accustomed to consider an inferior intelligence:
a sort of schoolboy when young, and schoolmaster when mature a visibly
limited creature, not a member of our broader world. Without dismissing
any of these views she found them put aside for the reception of others
of an opposite character; and in her soul she would have ascribed it to
her cares of nursing that she had become thoughtful, doubtful, hopeful,
even prayerful, surcharged with zeal, to help to save a good sword for
the country. If in a world still barbarous we must have soldiers,
here was one whom it would be grievous to lose. He had fallen for the
country; and there was a moving story of how he had fallen. She inclined
to think more highly of him for having courted exposure on a miserable
frontier war where but a poor sheaf of glory could be gathered. And
he seemed to estimate his professional duties apart from an aim at the
laurels. A conception of the possibility of a man's being both a soldier
and morally a hero edged its way into her understanding. It stood
edgeways within, desirous of avoiding a challenge to show every feature.

The cares of nursing were Jane's almost undividedly, except for the
aid