s out of bed and says his prayers like an
honest gentleman--he very often forgot to do this same, but he did it
this morning carefully--much I am afraid as a kind of charm or
incantation, till he came to the Lord's Prayer itself, and then his
whole happy soul wedded itself to the eternal words, and he arose calm
and happy, and went down to bathe.

Happy, I said. Was he really happy? He ought to have been; for every
wish he had in this life was fulfilled. And yet, when Jim, and he, and
Halbert, were walking, towel in hand down the garden, they held this
conversation:--

"Sam, my dear old brother, at last," said Jim, "are you happy?"

"I ought to be, Jim," said Sam; "but I'm in the most confounded fright,
sir."--They generally are in a fright, when they are going to be
married, those Benedicts. What the deuce are they afraid of?

Our dear Jim was in anything but an enviable frame of mind. He had
found out several things which did not at all conduce to his happiness;
he had found out that it was one thing to propose going to India, or
No-man'sland, and cutting off every tie and association which he had in
the world; and that it was quite another thing to do that same. He had
found out that it was one thing to leave his sister in the keeping of
his friend Sam, and another to part from her probably for ever; and,
last of all, he had found out, ever since his father had put his arm
round his neck and kissed him, that night we know of, that he loved
that father beyond all men in this world. It was a new discovery; he
had never known it till he found he had got to part with him. And now,
when he woke in the night, our old merry-hearted Jim sat up in bed, and
wept; aye, and no shame to him for it, when he thought of that
handsome, calm, bronzed face tearless and quiet there, over the
fortifications and the mathematics, when he was far away.

"He will never say a word, Sam," said Jim, as they were walking down to
bathe this very morning of the wedding; "but he'll think the more. Sam,
I am afraid I have done a selfish thing in going; but if I were to draw
back now, I should never be the same to him again. He couldn't stand
that. But I am sorry I ever thought of it."

"I don't know, Jim," said Halbert, pulling off his trowsers, "I really
don't know of any act of parliament passed in favour of the Brentwood
family, exempting them from the ordinary evils of humanity. Do you
think now, that when John Nokes, aged nineteen, goes i