"No. You think, perhaps, there is no other General in the world. I mean poor Elphinstone."
"The old man is going fast."
"And the evening of his life is full of dark clouds, without a single star," added Waller.
"You grow quite poetic, Bob."
"Then it is amid the veriest prose of life."
"I had a narrow escape from a juzail ball," said Denzil, rather pensively. "It passed through my forage-cap, and I have no wish to be killed as a subaltern."
"A bullet won't feel a bit the more pleasant if it hits you as a captain," said a 37th man, laughing.
Would Rose regret him? had been Denzil's secret thought; and now amid the gay clatter of tongues around him, the speculations as to the treaty on the tapis, the chances of a peaceful retreat, the pros and cons of why Sale did not cut his way back from Jellalabad, and some of that banter about women which seems inseparable from the conversation of young men—more than all, of military men—he was startled by some of the things that were said of Rose Trecarrel, and which, though bitter to hear, served to divert his grief. His self-esteem—his amour propre had been severely wounded, and he had to conceal these emotions from Waller and Polwhele; yet they suspected that "something was up," by his ceasing to go near the Trecarrels, at whose villa near the Residency he had been almost a daily visitor.
Could the young man have foreseen it, in his bitterness he might have rejoiced that the Afghan sabre was ere long to cut the Gordian knot of all his difficulties.
Jack Polwhele, who had been eyeing him silently with a comical twinkle in his black eyes, said, in a low voice—