'What game?'
'Love-making.'
'Cruel—cruel! God may forgive you, but I never will!' he exclaimed, and wheeling round his horse, galloped furiously away.
How astonished Dalton would have been could he have seen the change that came over the face and manner of the lady he had just left so abruptly.
Her eyes flashed with joyous triumph, yet they were full of welling tears; her lip quivered; her cheeks were deeply flushed; an agitation beyond her control made her whole form to vibrate; and as she struck her gloved hands together she exclaimed, in a low and fervent voice, with almost a sob in it, 'At last—at last I have completely triumphed—have ground him to the dust! At last he loves me, and I have conquered his cold, proud heart!'
Then leaping lightly as a girl from her horse, on reaching her own gate, she passionately embraced and kissed little Netty again and again, greatly to the bewilderment of the child, who had never seen her mother so agitated before.
That night she despatched a note to the camp requesting Captain Dalton to visit her again.
All the next day passed, and no answer came.
Her excitement became intense; she sent a messenger to the North Camp to make inquiries, and he returned with the, to her, now most startling tidings that the Rifles had marched that morning for embarkation, and that her note was lying undelivered in the empty hut of Captain Dalton, who had left the lines for Southampton.
She had boasted to him laughingly and with affected pride and bitterness of the game she had been playing. She had held a trump card in her hand, and now it seemed that she had played and lost it.