When George Peritt, alias Bottles, had finished reading and re-reading this letter, he folded it up neatly and put it, after his methodical fashion, into his pocket. Then he sat and stared at the red camellia blooms before him, that somehow looked as indistinct and misty as though they were fifty yards off instead of so many inches.
“It is a great blow,” he said to himself. “Poor Madeline! How she must suffer!”
Presently he rose and walked—rather unsteadily, for he felt much upset—to his quarters, and, taking a sheet of notepaper, wrote the following letter to catch the outgoing mail:—
“My dear Madeline,—I have got your letter putting an end to our engagement. I don’t want to dwell on myself when you must have so much to suffer, but I must say that it has been, and is, a great blow to me. I have loved you for so many years, ever since we were babies, I think; it does seem hard to lose you now after all. I thought that when we got home I might get the adjutancy of a militia regiment, and that we might have been married. I think we might have managed on five hundred a year, though perhaps I have no right to expect you to give up comforts and luxuries to which you are accustomed; but I am afraid that when one is in love one is apt to be selfish. However, all that is done with now, as, of course, putting everything else aside, I could not think of standing in your way in life. I love you much too well for that, dear Madeline, and you are too beautiful and delicate to be the wife of a poor subaltern with little beside his pay. I can honestly say that I hope you will be happy. I don’t ask you to think of me too often, as that might make you less so, but perhaps sometimes when you are quiet you will spare your old lover a thought or two, because I am sure nobody could care for you more than I do. You need not be afraid that I shall forget you or marry anybody else. I shall do neither the one nor the other. I must close this now to catch the mail; I don’t know that there is anything more to say. It is a hard trial—very; but it is no good being weak and giving way, and it consoles me to think that you are ‘bettering yourself’ as the servants say. Good-bye, dear Madeline. May God bless you, is now and ever my earnest prayer.
“J. G. Peritt.”
Scarcely was this letter finished and hastily dispatched when a loud voice was heard calling, “Bottles, Bottles, my boy, come rejoice with me; the orders have come—we sail in a fortnight;” followed by the owner of the voice, another subaltern, and our hero’s bosom friend. “Why, you don’t seem very elated,” said he of the voice, noting his friend’s dejected and somewhat dazed appearance.
“No—that is, not particularly. So you sail in a fortnight, do you?”
“‘You sail?’ What do you mean? Why, we all sail, of course, from the colonel down to the drummer-boy.”
“I don’t think that I—I am going to sail, Jack,” was the hesitating answer.
“Look here, old fellow, are you off your head, or have you been liquoring up, or what?”