eelings,
and they thought it was remorse and sorrow for his patron's loss which
affected the young man, in error of which opinion he chose to leave
them. As a companion he was so moody and silent that the two officers,
his fellow-sufferers, left him to himself mostly, liked little very
likely what they knew of him, consoled themselves with dice, cards, and
the bottle, and whiled away their own captivity in their own way. It
seemed to Esmond as if he lived years in that prison: and was changed
and aged when he came out of it. At certain periods of life we live
years of emotion in a few weeks--and look back on those times, as on
great gaps between the old life and the new. You do not know how much
you suffer in those critical maladies of the heart, until the disease is
over and you look back on it afterwards. During the time, the suffering
is at least sufferable. The day passes in more or less of pain, and the
night wears away somehow. 'Tis only in after days that we see what the
danger has been--as a man out a-hunting or riding for his life looks at
a leap, and wonders how he should have survived the taking of it. O dark
months of grief and rage! of wrong and cruel endurance! He is old now
who recalls you. Long ago he has forgiven and blest the soft hand that
wounded him: but the mark is there, and the wound is cicatrized only--no
time, tears, caresses, or repentance, can obliterate the scar. We are
indocile to put up with grief, however. Reficimus rates quassas: we
tempt the ocean again and again, and try upon new ventures. Esmond
thought of his early time as a novitiate, and of this past trial as
an initiation before entering into life--as our young Indians undergo
tortures silently before they pass to the rank of warriors in the tribe.

The officers, meanwhile, who were not let into the secret of the grief
which was gnawing at the side of their silent young friend, and being
accustomed to such transactions, in which one comrade or another was
daily paying the forfeit of the sword, did not, of course, bemoan
themselves very inconsolably about the fate of their late companion in
arms. This one told stories of former adventures of love, or war,
or pleasure, in which poor Frank Esmond had been engaged; t'other
recollected how a constable had been bilked, or a tavern-bully beaten:
whilst my lord's poor widow was sitting at his tomb worshipping him as
an actual saint and spotless hero--so the visitors said who had news of
L