him on. So he took him one morning to the Horse Guards, and
introduced him to the commander-in-chief, who promised him a
commission. There was a little delay in keeping this promise, and the
young man did not go troubling uncles again, but took the self-reliant
course of writing direct to the Horse Guards, to remind the
Commander-in-chief of what he had said; and before long Mr. Roger
Charles Tichborne was gazetted a cornet in the 6th Dragoons, better
known as the Carabineers. He passed his examination at Sandhurst
satisfactorily, and went straight over to Dublin to join his regiment.
From Dublin he went to the south of Ireland, and twice he came over to
England on short visits. He went through the painful ordeal of
practical joking which awaited every young officer in those days, and
came out of it, not without annoyance and an occasional display of
resentment, yet in a way which conciliated his brother officers; and
few men were more liked in the regiment than Roger Tichborne,
affectionately nicknamed among them "Teesh." In 1852 the Carabineers
came over to England, and were quartered at Canterbury. They expected
then to be sent to India, but the order was countermanded, and Roger
saw himself doomed apparently to a life of inaction. There is a letter
of Roger's among the mass of correspondence which he kept up at this
period of his life, in which he notices the fact that his mother still
dwelt upon her old idea of providing him with a wife in the shape of
one of those Italian princesses of which he had heard so much, and
with whom he had always been threatened. But Roger was by this time in
love with his cousin, and his love was by no means happy. Roger had
been for years visiting at Tichborne before he had ever seen his
cousin Kate there. He had met her long before when he came over as a
child from Paris on a visit, but Miss Doughty was too young at that
time to have retained much impression of the little dark-haired French
boy, who could hardly have said "Good morning, cousin," in her native
tongue. When Roger was twenty years of age, they met for a few days at
Bath, where both had come on the melancholy duty of taking leave of Mr.
Seymour, then lying dangerously ill and near his death. Then they
parted again; Roger went to Tichborne for a long stay, but Miss
Doughty returned to school at the convent at Taunton. In the Midsummer
holidays, however, they once more met at the house in Hampshire, and
for six weeks the y