o attend Lady
Mabel. When he returned to his parlor, seeing Sir Rowland's insulted
despatch still lying on the floor, he condescended to pick it up and
stow it away in his pocket with his notes on the state of the
Andalusian reserve and the garrison of Badajoz, and then rode off in
the happiest mood to head-quarters. But when he dismounted there, his
conscience pricked him. An ambitious soldier, zealous in the cause for
which he fought, he, not long since, would have felt one moment's
forgetfulness, or the slightest neglect of the service, to be treason
against his own nature. He now turned back from the door to bid the
groom leave his own horse in Elvas, and take the fresh horse on to the
little town of Albuquerque, and expect him at the posada there before
the dawn of day. Having, by this provision for riding post, quieted
the compunctious visitings of conscience, he entered the house.

Lady Mabel kept him waiting some time, purposely, for delay was now
her policy. Soon, however, he heard her talking in the next room, and
the abrupt and crabbed tones of the voice which answered her, betrayed
Moodie in one of his objecting and protesting moods. Lady Mabel was
giving sundry injunctions to an unwilling agent. At length the old
Scotch grieve, like one of his own ill-conditioned steers, would
neither lead nor drive; for when she bid him to put the clock back an
hour, he flatly refused, calling it acting a lie, as the wily
Gibeonites did to Joshua.

"Or as Jacob and Rebecca did to blind old Isaac," Lady Mabel
suggested; but even the example of the patriarch could not move him,
and Lady Mabel had to make time move backward with her own hand.

At length she entered the room radiant with beauty and with smiles,
for Moodie's obstinacy had not ruffled her in the least. She was so
sorry to have kept Colonel L'Isle waiting, and so much afraid he would
have to wait a while longer, as the old Lisbon coach and the mules,
with their harness, were not put together so speedily, as the London
turn-out of a fashionable lady. "I am to blame," she continued, "for
not having looked to it before, for Antonio Lobo, my impromptu
postillion, is less skilled in the management of my vehicle, than of
the olive trees among which he has lived until he has taken the color
of their ripe fruit."

To fill up the time she now asked L'Isle's opinion of her dress,
seeing him eye it with some surprise. Turning gracefully about and
showing it off to him