"I dare not impugn the plans of a beneficent Providence."
"But Providence never meant the conditions of life to turn out as they too often do."
"How, Richard," she, asked gently; "I don't quite understand you?"
"That the greatest number of the rich, the powerful and the most successful—by flukes, perhaps—are fools or knaves."
"Ah, but if riches brought talent—the wealthy and powerful would be too happy, and Fate or Providence do not make them so."
"I cannot express to you how my heart was wrung with jealous envy, and even with shame, when I saw Downie's family stand around my uncle's grave, and enjoying all the freedom and hospitality of Rhoscadzhel—even his cold-blooded, fashionable wife, too—and thought how my own three tender loves were debarred——"
"And unknown—"
"Yes——d—m it, unknown, and must be for a few weeks still, but time cures all evils, and it will cure this. Yet is not the gazetting of the two cousins, Denzil and the oldest of Downie's four boys, in one paragraph, and to my old corps, too a remarkable coincidence—all the more so, that they are ignorant of each other's existence?"
"My poor Denzil—he is so bright and clever!"
"Ay, more clever than ever I was. In my time, when I met you so happily in pleasant Montreal, one could be a fair average soldier without all the polyglot accomplishments so necessary now, when he who quits Sandhurst as a candidate for a commission direct, with five shillings and threepence per diem to further his extravagance, might quite as well come out for the Church or Bar, with the chance of a safer and better paid berth in either."