CHAPTER III. THE MAN IN POSSESSION. "Je ne vous aime pas, Hylas ; C'est que je ne vous aime pas." BUSSY: Comte de Rabutin. THE next day was Sunday-a calm peaceful Sabbath morning. Quite quiet and still, but for the shimmer among the leaves, or the music of the birds chirping their matin song beneath the blue arch of heaven's cathedral. The happy, harmless birds! They reminded Alured somehow of Millicent. She was like a wee sweet-voiced bird, that you might take into your hands and stroke its soft plumage, or feed with sugar from between your lips. A gentle modest little robin she appeared that Sunday, as she fluttered about the breakfast table in neat brown silk, demurely dressed for church. Yesterday she had been as gay as a humming-bird; but to-day it pleased her VOL. II. D to be sobered down, subdued, and unpretending in dress and manner. It was by accident, of course, that Alured and she got side by side, when the party started off for the morning service in the village; accident that he found himself seated near her in the Moynehan pew; accident that made her his companion on the way home. A chapter of such accidents makes up the romance of a life. Each is a link in the strong chain of circumstance by which the future is bound for ever. A man looks back and wonders how he came to like that girl so much. When and how; on what occasion did he first realize that her voice was the only music he cared to hear,—that the room was dark and desert when she was out of it,—when he knew her step upon the stairs or could swear to the rustle of her dress a dozen yards off? Accident brought them together; chance and good management created the opportunities by which a first liking was welded into the true steel of life-long attachment. Thus by chance, Alured renewed his acquaintance with Miss St. It was Helier; by good luck in that great countryhouse, he came to know her well. soon for him to feel how thoroughly she had enslaved him; still he was very loth to leave on Monday morning. He seemed to have been so short a time at King's Lilies. The pleasant hours had sped away on silver wings; and Monday, with its call to camp and Gaynor's peevish scoldings came all too soon. Lady Moynehan extracted something from the bitterness of departure, by pressing him to come again. "We're always at home on Wednesdays," she said. "I find it so hard to get leave,” Alured replied, hanging his head rather. "Lord Waltham comes from Banktown all the way," cries Millicent, tossing her head, "whenever we ask him, and he's in the Guards." As if her majesty's household troops were always specially busy. "I'm adjutant, and the colonel hates my going way," Alured went on, secretly rejoicing that Miss St. Helier wished him to come again. Bring your colonel too," said Lady Moynehan. "We shall be very glad to see him; and you-always mind that, Mr. Frere." Alured looked up thankfully, and at Millicent, but she would give him no such encouragement. Perhaps as the young man drove off her conscience smote her, for she put on her hat, and walked quickly across the shrubbery at the end of the lawn, past which, after a long detour, came the road to camp. Alured saw her there, leaning against an elm-tree, waiting, waiting for what? To see him pass? His heart gave a great jump, while his eyes brightened at the thought and what followed, for the wheels of his dog-cart roused her, and as she looked up and saw him, she made him a little wave of her hand which sent him home happy as a king. But the camp soon awakened him from such dreams. The end of a holiday is but a dreary business to a grown-up man or schoolboy. After it, the daily routine of Latin grammar, or duties as dry, seems a thousand times more dull than before. Now, the camp and all that was in it, was hateful to Alured. The straight lines of ugly huts, ranging back stiffly row behind row, the bare bald roads, treeless, verdureless, flowerless, the rigidly uncompromising figures in staring red and white that spotted the landscape here and there like poppies in a sparse-sown wheat field,-how different to King's Lilies! Charming women in a cosy house are pleasanter company than a soldier servant in your own dingy hut, reminding you that "the colonel, sor, has been tearing and swearing, and chow-rowing, sor, becos you wasn't back, sor." There was poetry in the one, in the other naught but the baldest prose. Gaynor was already in the orderly-room by the time Frere got to it. Really, Mr. Frere, this has been most inconvenient," he began. Everything had gone wrong. The general had sent for some special information which, in the adjutant's absence, could not be supplied. No one could draft a letter like Frere. A question had been raised by the War Office about the baggage fund, but the answer was locked up in Alured's breast. Three charges or indictments for a court-martial were waiting |