'Came back no more.'
'How?'
'He died a major at the passage of the Alma.'
'And his wife?'
'When her jewels were sold, married Hussein Aga (the steward of Ali Pasha), who paid me fifty piastres each time he left his slippers at the door. But you are an Ingleez—I can trust you to guard my wife better than I guarded the wife of Saïd—so watch her well, though she is pure as the daughter of Imraun, and gentle as the west wind, or the memory of a love we have lost when young.'
In ten minutes afterwards this coolest, queerest, and most cunning of all Yuze Bashis, had poised his huge bulk on the saddle of a fleet horse. With many sore misgivings, and terrors of the Seraskier and the Kiaja Kiatibi, he took his departure for Stamboul, leaving me in full possession of the fortress, and, more than all, of his wife, about whom, although I had not seen her, I felt some curiosity as he had acknowledged her to be young and beautiful as a Houri.
The plot of my Greek adventures was thickening!
'In love with the wife of one Turk, and solemnly requested, in a fatherly way of course, to look after the rib of another!' says Jack Belton, in one of his letters, which I received about this time by the hand of a mounted Koord. 'An arduous duty for a subaltern, Allan, but beware of meddling with such matters in Turkey! If the Horse Guards make light of dangers risked in the field of Mars, they will make lighter still of those encountered in the field of Venus. Allons, my boy! on the llth February, Fort Alexander at Sebastopol was blown up and entirely destroyed. There is no word of our moving in that direction yet, though it is said that a costermonger's ass would not exchange duties with our poor fellows in the trenches. I send you a box of prime cheroots; the last month's "Army List," the last Scotch newspaper, "Punch," and the corkscrew you required so much, and wishing you safe back again with your pins under the mess mahogany, remain, ever yours,
'J. BELTON
'Heraclea, March 1856.'