"The regimental agents, Messrs. Cox and Mair, of Craig's Court, London."
"By whom, colonel?"
"Your friends—you should know best."
"I have no friends—never had any," said I, bitterly.
"It was lodged two months since," resumed the colonel, "and gazetted you would have been ere this, but for our doubt about your fate, poor Captain Lindsay having sent your name to the War Office as missing."
I stood looking at the grave, kind, and soldierly old man with a stupified air.
My cousin Aurora must have done this—I was certain of it—for no one else in all the world knew of me, or cared for me; but I was too proud to accept of this donation even from her—from the usurper of my patrimony, for such I deemed her—and urged the colonel to write at once to the regimental agents, desiring them to return the money to the depositor thereof, whoever he or she might he.
I said this so haughtily, so bitterly, and peremptorily, and with such a flush on my cheek, that the adjutant and orderly-room clerks, who were fussing among docquets of papers and returns, looked up with surprise, and the old colonel, after carefully wiping a great pair of spectacles, put them on his copper-coloured nose, and surveyed me from head to foot with extreme coolness and curiosity.
"Zounds! Gauntlet," said he, "you are a very extraordinary fellow—very! Have you no wish to rise in the service?"
"By my own merit, sir, I have every wish, but not by the money—(of others, I was about to say, but added)—the money that should have been mine."