delighted when Elsie herself requested to be allowed to leave.

I must, however, have accidentally have shown my feelings towards her
and have "let the cat out of the bag" in the letter I sent home to my
mother, in answer to the last communication from Neuilly, asking her to
take charge of my darling Elsie until I came home to win and claim her.

I imagined this from something that leaked out afterwards, and from the
somewhat altered tone of Elsie's letters to me from the date of her
leaving France to live with my mother; for, though affectionate enough,
they had a certain little air of constraint about them, and though she
spoke of various objects of interest to both of us, and of different
persons whom she and I knew, and places she went to, she never by any
chance ever mentioned herself, never after the letters she sent me
containing the passionate outpouring of her inmost heart on receiving
the news of her father's death, albeit all this she would feel perfectly
certain was to me a sacred confidence.

Slight as the change was in her subsequent correspondence, I noticed it
and it worried me, and determined me to have the matter cleared up as
soon as I possibly could.

Meanwhile, however, I had to fulfil the colonel's last trust, and as I
knew what his intentions had been in regard to the crisis in Venezuelan
affairs at the time when an assassin's hand prevented him from acting
the part he intended to play in the existing revolution, I thought I
should be only carrying out his wishes in putting myself in his place,
as far as it lay in my power to do so.

So, soon after coming to Caracas and settling the details of the
colonel's last depositions, making my own will in my turn in case of
accidents, though in what way is best known to myself, I went to the
headquarters of the Government troops and joined the army of General
Gomez.

Under this able leader I fought in several engagements that were fierce
and sanguinary as all such fratricidal contests are, and ever have been
in the annals of civil war, at San Sebastien, Carapana, Tarasca, and
elsewhere, our guerilla struggle extending over the whole extensive
country in almost every direction, where there was a town to sack or
property to plunder, until at last the insurgent "patriots" were
conquered and peace restored.

All this took a long time; and then, having had enough and to spare of
fighting and bloodshed, and tired of mining too, I disposed of my
interest