'What do you mean?' asked Goring, in a weak voice, but angrily.
'Mean, man alive! don't you know? It means that the parade is cancelled.'
'I had forgotten, but, till I dismiss the piquet, parades are nothing to me,' said Goring, turning his face to the wall, and Fleming departed, fully believing from the manner and appearance of his senior officer that 'he was screwed tight as a drum, by Jove!—on duty, too! I wonder the fellow doesn't cut Aldershot now—he's rich enough; can draw cheques galore; not get them, like me, with strong paternal comments, and perhaps well-deserved objurgations.'
And Bevil Goring lay there in his hut, hearing the incessant drums beating and bugles sounding with a dazed feeling, as if he had been shot into another world. With him it was—
'Oh, love for a year, a month, a day,
But alas for the love that loves alway!'
'What the devil is up with Goring?' said Fleming and others of the dépôt; 'within the last few days he has looked older by ten years—worn and worried—not at all like a man who has just come into a fine pot of money.'
CHAPTER XIII.
THE JOURNEY.
At last he got his leave of absence and was off for London. Food remained before him almost untasted or forgotten. He ate eventually, but very sparingly, like one who knows it should be partaken of only for strength to achieve some task that was to come.
'We no longer travel,' wrote Thackeray, with reference to some of the improvements of the age; 'we are carried from place to place,' and Goring was sensible of what another writer calls 'the tedious hurry of locomotion,' as he was swept on his way to Harwich by the 7 p.m. train from the great bustling and brilliantly lighted station at Liverpool Street.