suppose it’s hardly the poor creature’s fault.  None the less, you know, we have to fight him.  And now he ’s nibbling at a bait—­it ’s fun:  the lady I mentioned, with a turn for adventure and enterprise:  it’s rare fun:  he ’s nibbling, he’ll be hooked.  You must make her acquaintance, Mr. Colesworth, and hold your own against her, if you can.  She’s a niece of my wife’s and I’ll introduce you.  I shall find her in London, or at our lodgings at a Surrey farm we’ve taken to nurse my cousin Captain Philip O’Donnell invalided from Indian awful climate!—­on my return, when I hope to renew the acquaintance.  She has beauty, she has brains.  Resist her, and you ’ll make a decent stand against Lucifer.  And supposing she rolls you up and pitches you over, her noticing you is a pretty compliment to your pen.  That ‘ll be consoling.’

Mr. Colesworth fancied, he said, that he was proof against feminine blandishments in the direction of his writings.

He spoke as one indicating a thread to suggest a cable.  The captain applauded the fancy as a pleasing delusion of the young sprigs of Journalism.

Upon this, Mr. Colesworth, with all respect for French intelligence, denied the conclusiveness of French generalisations, which ascribed to women universal occult dominion, and traced all great affairs to small intrigues.

The captain’s eyes twinkled on him, thinking how readily he would back smart Miss Kathleen to do the trick, if need were.

He said to her before she started:  ’Don’t forget he may be a clever fellow with that pen of his, and useful to our party.’

‘I’ll not forget,’ said she.

For the good of his party, then, Captain Con permitted her to take the walk up Caer Gybi alone with Mr. Colesworth:  a memorable walk in the recollections of the scribe, because of the wonderful likeness of the young lady to the breezy weather and the sparkles over the deep, the cloud that frowned, the cloud that glowed, the green of the earth greening out from under wings of shadow, the mountain ranges holding hands about an immensity of space.  It was one of our giant days to his emotions, and particularly memorable to him through the circumstance that it insisted on a record in verse, and he was unused to the fetters of metre:  and although the verse was never seen by man, his attempt at it confused his ideas of his expressive powers.  Oddly too, while scourging the lines with criticism, he had a fondness for them:  they stamped a radiant day in his mind, beyond the resources of rhetoric to have done it equally.

This was the day of Captain Con’s crossing the Rubicon between the secret of his happiness and a Parliamentary career.

CHAPTER XVIII

CAPTAIN CON’S LETTER

Women may be able to tell you why the nursing of a military invalid awakens tenderer anxieties in their bosoms than those called forth by the drab civilian.  If we are under sentence of death we are all of us pathetic of course; but stretched upon the debateable couch of sickness we are not so touching as the coloured coat:  it has the distinction belonging to colour.  It smites a deeper nerve, or more than one; and this, too, where there is no imaginary subjection to the charms of military glory, in minds to which the game of war is lurid as the plumes of the arch-slayer.