With Moore at Corunna

by G. A. Henty

"You would have got me out some other way if he hadn't," the girl said, with confidence. "No, Terence, you can say what you like, but I shall always consider that you have been wonderfully brave and clever."

"Then you will always think quite wrong," Terence said, bluntly.

"I shall begin to think that you are a tyrant, like the Bishop of Oporto, if you speak in that positive way. How old are you, sir?"

"I was sixteen six months ago."

"And I was sixteen three days ago," she said. "Fancy your commanding two thousand soldiers and only six months older than I am."

"It is not I, it is the uniform," Terence said. "They obey me when they won't obey their own officers, because I am on the English general's staff. They know that we have thrashed the French, and that their own officers know nothing at all about fighting, and they have no respect whatever for them. More than that, they despise them because they know that they are always intriguing, and that really, although they may be called generals, they are but politicians. You will see, when they get English officers to discipline them, they will turn out capital soldiers; but they think so little of their own, that if anything goes wrong their first idea is that their officers must be traitors, and so fall upon them and murder them.

"You look older than I do, Mary. You seem to me quite a woman, while, in spite of my uniform and my command, and all that, I am really only a boy."

"I suppose I am almost a woman, Terence, but I don't feel so. You see out here girls often marry at sixteen. I know father said once that he hoped I shouldn't marry until I was eighteen, and that he wanted to keep me young. I never thought about getting almost a woman until the bishop told me one day that if I chose to marry a señor that he would choose for me, he would get me absolution from my vows, and that I need not then resign my property."

"The old blackguard!" Terence exclaimed, angrily. "And what did you say to him?"

"I said that, in the first place, I had never thought of marrying; that in the second place, I had not taken any vows; and in the third place that when I did marry I would choose for myself. He got into a terrible rage, and said that I was an obstinate heretic, and that some day when I was tired of my prison I would think better of it."