nto Parliament, which opened all the secrets
of power? For this I had two reasons. The first--and, let me confess,
the most imperious--was, that my pride had been deeply hurt by the
loss of my commission. I felt that I had not only been deprived of a
noble profession, accidental as was the loss; but that I had
subjected myself to the trivial, but stinging remarks, which never
fail to find an obnoxious cause for every failure. While this cloud
hung over me, I was determined never to return to my father's house.
Good-natured as the friends of my family might be, I was fully aware
of the style in which misfortune is treated in the idleness of
country life; and the Honourable Mr Marston's loss of his rank in his
Majesty's guards, or his preference of a more pacific promotion, was
too tempting a topic to lose any of its stimulants by the popular
ignorance of the true transaction. My next reason was, that my mind
was harassed and wearied by disappointment, until I should not have
regreted to terminate the struggle in the first field of battle. The
only woman whom I loved, and whom, in the strange frenzy of passion,
I solemnly believed to be the only woman on earth deserving to be so
loved, had wholly disappeared, and was, by this time, probably
wedded. The only woman whom I regarded as a friend, was in another
country, probably dying. If I could have returned to Mortimer
Castle--which I had already determined to be impossible--I should
have found only a callous, perhaps a contemptuous, head of the
family, angry at my return to burden him. Even Vincent--my old and
kind-hearted friend Vincent--had been a soldier; and though I was
sure of never receiving a reproach from his wise and gentle lips, was
I equally sure that I could escape the flash, or the sorrow, of his
eye?

In thoughts like these, and they were dangerous ones, I made many a
solitary rush out into the wild winds and beating snows of the
winter, which had set in early and been remarkably severe; walking
bareheaded in the most lonely places of the suburbs, stripping my
bosom to the blast, and longing for its tenfold chill to assuage the
fever which burned within me. I had also found the old delay at the
Horse-guards. The feelings of this period make me look with infinite
compassion on the unhappy beings who take their lives into their own
hands, and who extinguish all their earthly anxieties at a plunge.
But I had imbibed principles of a firmer substance, and but up