"'Twill come. Only you are young, impatient, hot-headed. I am almost old, yet I am the same sometimes--but you will not wait. What's to do, therefore?"
"I cannot think nor dream--oh, that I could!"
"Then listen to me. 'Tis not the way of the world to do so until it is too late; in your case you may be willing. Do you know Marlborough?"
"As the subaltern knows the general, not being known by him. But no more."
"'Tis pity. Yet--yet if you could bring yourself before his notice; if--if--you could do something that should come under his eyes--some deed of daring----"
"I must be there to do it--not here. At St. James's or Whitehall I can do nought. The watch can do as much as I."
"That's very true; you must be there. There! there! Let me see for it. Where are the charts?" and Lord Peterborough went towards a great table near the window, which was all littered with maps and plans that made the whole heterogeneous mass look more like a battlefield itself after a battle than aught else.
"Bah!" his lordship went on, picking up first a plan and then a chart, and throwing them down again. "Catalonia, Madrid, Barcelona, Cadiz. No good! no good! Marlborough will not be there. The war may roll, must roll, towards Spain, yet 'tis not in Spain that he will be. But Holland--Brabant--Flanders. Ha!" he cried at the two latter names. "Brabant--Flanders. And--why did I not think of it?--she is there, and there's the chance, and--and, fool that I am! for the moment I had forgotten it."
"She! The chance! Brabant! Flanders!" Bevill Bracton repeated, the words stumbling over each other in his excitement. "She! Who? And what have I to do with women--with any woman? I, who wish to do all a man may do in the eyes of men?"
"Sit down," Lord Peterborough said now, in a marvellously calm, a suddenly calm, voice. "Sit down. I had forgotten my manners when I failed to ask you to do so earlier."