'What was that?' asked Lewie.
'To forget her; and to do so I threw myself into my profession. I never looked upon her face again, and I thanked God when I heard our drums beating as we marched out of Fort Nassau, and when the accursed shore of the Berbice river faded into the evening sea! Now, Lewie, have I not the best of reasons for mistrusting women, and seeking to save you from the fangs of this little ogress—this Dolores?'
'Ah, you know not her of whom you speak thus!' exclaimed Lewie.
'Nor am I likely to do so. Shun her, nephew! a girl, doubtless, with a fair face, and a heart as black as Gehenna! Be firm, Lewie Baronald!—firmness is a great thing, as you will find when you come to be a general officer and as old as I am.'
Lewie had done his duty like a man and a soldier—like one worthy of the glorious old Brigade—among the savages in the old Cape War; but it was cruel, absurd, and, to use the Countess van Renslaer's phrase, 'grotesque,' that he should now be treated like a child, and in the most momentous matter of his life and happiness too!
'I was weak enough—idiot enough, to wish I might die, then and there, when that girl deceived me,' resumed his uncle bitterly; 'but I knew that I must live on and on; I was very young, and thought I might live for forty years with that pain in my heart at night and in the morning. It is twenty years since then, and though the pain is dead, I suppose, I cannot laugh at it yet, or the memory of Mercedes.'
'Mercedes! was that her name—Mercedes?'
'The devil—it has escaped me!'
'So that is the name which is not to go down in the annals of the family?'
'Precisely so.'