'Cynical again.'
'I can't help being so, Trevor, as well as being a simpleton.'
'Nay, don't say so, Jerry,' said the soldier, kindly; 'I think this unchanging love you have for a girl who used you so does honour to your heart, especially in this age of ours, when we are much more addicted to pence than to poetry; and, as some one says, the sauce piquante of life is its glorious uncertainty.'
'And Clare—what were your thoughts and conclusions about her?
'My thoughts you know; my conclusions—I have none,' replied Chute, who, since he had again seen and talked with Clare Collingwood, had felt his heart too full of her to confide, even to his friend, as yet, what hope or fear he had.
'And you saw Violet, too?' asked Vane, to fill up a pause.
'Oh, yes,' replied Chute, with animation; 'Violet, whilom the pretty little girl—the child with a wealth of golden hair flowing below her waist, and no end of mischief and fun in her bright blue eyes; she seems the same now as then. She actually spoke of Desmond being an admirer of Clare.'
'Surely that was bad form in the girl, to you especially.'
'She did so through pure inadvertence, Jerry; but I must own that, when coupled with your remarks, the circumstance stung me more than a week ago I could have anticipated. But I suppose such trials as those of ours,' he continued, helping himself to a bumper of sherry without waiting to be asked, 'are part and parcel of the ills that manhood has to encounter—"Manhood, with all its chances and changes, its wild revels and its dark regrets—its sparkling champagne-cup and its bitter aconite lying at the dregs."'
'Times there are when I blush at my own want of proper pride of heart in continuing to mourn after a girl who has quietly let me drop into the place of a mere friend.'