'Could you care still for such a fogey as I have become?' asked the General in a low voice; 'care for me again, I mean?'
'I am not now the thoughtless girl you loved in the past time.'
'But you are the woman I love now—the girl I never forgot and never ceased to love!' he exclaimed, while surprised at his own impetuosity and fluency. 'Once, at least, in our lives heaven seems to open to all of us: it opened to me when I first knew and loved Mercedes; and now heaven seems to have come to me again!'
And now, to the memory of both, there came back the murmur of the Berbice river, with its giant water-lilies; the glorious moon and stars of the tropics, looking down on the grassy ramparts of Fort Nassau, the palisades and spires of New Amsterdam, and the love-scenes of the past time; and when Kinloch rose to depart, it was with the promise that he would return betimes on the morrow.
It would be rather difficult to describe the emotions of the whilom misogynist, as he turned on his homeward way.
Joy at being restored to Mercedes, and gratified vanity that he could yet inspire love, conflicted curiously with a dread that he had compromised his own dignity and his long-vaunted opinions of the sex by this sudden surrender—this yielding to her great beauty and her old influence over him.
What would Drumlanrig, Dundas, and other old chums of the Brigade think of him? and what would Lewie Baronald say?—poor Lewie, whom he had doomed to foreign service to save him, as he had phrased it, 'from the fangs of Dolores'!
He felt his brown cheek blush hotly at the thought.
'That must be amended,' he muttered; 'to-morrow I shall see the Director-General of Infantry.'
It was impossible for him to shut his eyes to the fact that Dolores was every way a desirable bride for Lewie; and that, apart from her being the daughter of his own first and only love, she was the lionne of the Hague, who was fêted and courted, whose toilettes were copied, whose sallies were retailed, and who was the central figure in society there.