ther matter: the Council of Regency will
no doubt pester you with representations that I should--if time still
remains--advance to the relief of Ciudad Rodrigo. Understand, that is
no part of my plan of campaign. I do not stir across the frontier of
Portugal. Here let the French come and find me, and I shall be ready to
receive them. Let the Portuguese Government have no illusions on that
point, and stimulate the Council into doing all possible to carry out
the destruction of mills and the laying waste of the country in the
valley of the Mondego and wherever else I have required.

"Oh, and by the way, you will find your brother-in-law, Mr. Butler, in
the guard-room yonder, awaiting my orders. Provide him with a uniform
and bid him rejoin his regiment at once. Recommend him to be more
prudent in future if he wishes me to forget his escapade at Tavora. And
in future, O'Moy, trust your wife. Again, good-bye. Come, Grant!--I have
instructions for you too. But you must take them as we ride."

And thus Sir Terence O'Moy found sanctuary at the altar of his country's
need. They left him incredulously to marvel at the luck which had so
enlisted circumstances to save him where all had seemed so surely lost
an hour ago.

He sent a servant to fetch Mr. Butler, the prime cause of all this
pother--for all of it can be traced to Mr. Butler's invasion of the
Tavora nunnery--and with him went to bear the incredible tidings of
their joint absolution to the three who waited so anxiously in the
dining-room.

POSTSCRIPTUM

The particular story which I have set myself to relate, of how Sir
Terence O'Moy was taken in the snare of his own jealousy, may very
properly be concluded here. But the greater story in which it is
enshrined and with which it is interwoven, the story of that other snare
in which my Lord Viscount Wellington took the French, goes on. This
story is the history of the war in the Peninsula. There you may pursue
it to its very end and realise the iron will and inflexibility of
purpose which caused men ultimately to bestow upon him who guided that
campaign the singularly felicitous and fitting sobriquet of the Iron
Duke.

Ciudad Rodrigo's Spanish garrison capitulated on the 10th of July of
that year 1810, and a wave of indignation such as must have overwhelmed
any but a man of almost superhuman mettle swept up against Lord
Wellington for having stood inactive within the frontiers of Portugal
and never stirred a