"Thanks for your good wishes," was the unabashed reply; "however, I am wide enough awake, sir; be assured that I cut my eye-teeth some years ago."
To find that such a creature as he had crept into her Majesty's service, even into such an unaristocratic force as the Land Transport Corps, and actually wore a sword and epaulettes, bewildered me, excited my indignation and disgust; and I felt degraded that by a reflected light he was sharing our dangers, our horrors, and the honours of the war. I had never seen his name in the Gazette, as being appointed a cornet of the Transport Corps, and the surprise I felt was mingled with profound contempt, and something of amusement, too, at his insouciance and cool effrontery. This made me partially forget the rage and hatred he had excited in me by the mischievous game he had played at Walcot Park, his plot to ruin me with Estelle Cressingham--a plot from which I had been so victoriously disentangled. Hence circumstance, change of position and place, induced me to talk to the fellow in a way that I should not have done at home or elsewhere.
"How came you to deprive England of the advantages of your society?" I asked, in a sneering tone, of which he was too well-bred not to be conscious; so he replied in the same manner,
"A verse of an old song may best explain it:
"'A plague on ill luck, now the ready's all gone,
To the wars poor Pilgarlick must trudge;
But had I the cash to rake on as I've done,
The devil a foot I would budge!'
"And so Pilgarlick is serving his ungrateful country," he added, with the mocking laugh that I remembered of old.
"You can actually laugh at your own--"
"Don't say anything unpleasant," said he, shortening his reins; "I do so, but only as Reynard, who has lost his brush, laughs at the more clever fox who has kept his from the hounds," he added, with a glance of malevolence. "So you were not at the Alma? Doubtless it was pleasanter to break a bone quietly at home than risk all your limbs here in action."
Disdaining to notice either his sneer or the inference to be drawn from his remark, I asked, "What has become of that unhappy creature--your wife?"