"Come!" cried he, at last, "if your resolve be taken, so is mine. If you leave for India, I shall never quit the Crimea."

"It is not thus I expected one to speak who loves his mother as you do,"

said she, reproachfully.

"Ah, Sybella, it would indeed have been a happy day for me when I should have returned to her in honor, could I but have said, 'You have not alone a son beneath your roof, but a dear daughter also.' If all that they call my great luck had brought this fortune, then had I been indeed a fellow to be envied. Without that hope there is not another that I want to cling to."

She tried gently to withdraw her hand from his, but he held it in his grasp, and continued,--

"You, who never heard of me till the first day we met, know little of the stored-up happiness your very name has afforded me for many a day,--how, days long, Jack talked of you to me as we rambled together, how the long nights of the trenches were beguiled by telling of you,--till at length I scarcely knew whether I had not myself known and loved you for years. I used to fancy, too, how every trait of poor Jack--his noble ardor, his generous devotion--might be displayed amidst the softer and more graceful virtues of womanhood; and at last I came to know you, far and away above all I have ever dreamed of."

"Let me go,--let me say good-bye," said she, in a faint whisper.

"Bear with me a few moments longer, Sybella," cried he, passionately.

"With all their misery, they are the happiest of my life."

"This is unfair,--it is almost ungenerous of you," said she, with scarcely stifled emotion, and still endeavoring to withdraw her hand.

"So it is!" cried he, suddenly; "it is unmanly and ignoble both, and it is only a poor, selfish sick man could stoop to plead so abjectly." He relinquished her hand as he spoke, and then, grasping it suddenly, he pressed it to his lips, and burst into tears. "A soldier should be made of better stuff, Sybella," said he, trying to smile.

"Goodbye,--good-bye."

"It is too late to say so now," said she, faintly; "I will not go."

"Not go,--not leave me, Sybella?" cried he. "Oh that I may have heard you aright! Did you say you would remain with me, and for how long?"

"Forever!" said she, stooping down and kissing his forehead. The next moment she was gone.

"Come, Conway," said the doctor, "cheer up, my good fellow; you 'll be all right in a week or so. You 've got something worth living for, too, if all accounts be true."

"More than you think for, doctor," said Conway, heartily,--"far more than you think for."

"The lawyer talks of a peerage and a fine estate."

"Far more than that," cried Conway; "a million times better."

The surgeon turned a look of half apprehension on the sick man, and, gently closing the shutters, he withdrew.

Dark as was that room, and silent as it was, what blissful hopes and blessed anticipations crowded and clustered around that low "sick-bed"!

What years of happiness unfolded themselves before that poor brain, which no longer felt a pang, save in the confusion of its bright imaginings! How were wounds forgotten and sufferings unminded in those hours wherein a whole future was revealed!

At last he fell off to sleep, and to dream of a fair white hand that parted the hair upon his forehead, and then gently touched his feverish cheek. Nor was it all a dream; she was at his bedside.

CHAPTER XXXIII. "GROG" IN COUNCIL

"What dreary little streets are those that lead from the Strand towards the Thames! Pinched, frail, semi-genteel, and many-lodgered are the houses, mysteriously indicative of a variously occupied population, and painfully suggesting, by the surging conflict of busy life at one end, and the dark flowing river at the other, an existence maintained between struggle and suicide." This, most valued reader, if no reflection of mine, but was the thought that occupied the mind of one who, in not the very best of humors, and of a wet and dreary night, knocked, in succession, at half the doors in the street in search after an acquaintance.

"Yes, sir, the second back," said a sleepy maid-servant at last; "he is just come in."

"All right," said the stranger. "Take that carpet-bag and writing-desk upstairs to his room, and say that Captain Davis is coming after them.'"

"You owe me a tip, Captain," said the cabman, catching the name as he was about to mount his box. "Do you remember the morning I drove you down to Blackwall to catch the Antwerp boat, I went over Mr. Moss, the sheriff's officer, and smashed his ankle, and may I never taste bitters again if I got a farthing for it."

"I remember," said Davis, curtly. "Here's a crown. I 'd have made it a sovereign if it had been his neck you 'd gone over."

"Better luck next time, sir, and thank you," said the man, as he drove away.

The maid was yet knocking for admission when Grog arrived at the door.

"Captain Fisk, sir,--Captain Fisk, there 's a gent as says--"

"That will do," said Davis, taking the key from her hand and opening the door for himself.

"Old Grog himself, as I'm a living man!" cried a tall, much whiskered and moustached fellow, who was reading a "Bell's Life" at the fire.

"Ay, Master Fisk,--no other," said Davis, as he shook his friend cordially by the hand. "I 've had precious work to find you out I was up at Duke Street, then they sent me to the Adelphi; after that I tried Ling's, in the Hay-market, and it was a waiter there--"

"Joe," broke in the other.

"Exactly. Joe told me that I might chance upon you here."

"Well, I 'm glad to see you, old fellow, and have a chat about long ago," said Fisk, as he placed a square green bottle and some glasses on the table. How well you 're looking, too; not an hour older than when I saw you four years ago!"

"Ain't I, though!" muttered Grog. "Ay, and like the racers, I 've got weight for age, besides. I'm a stone and a half heavier than I ought to be, and there's nothing worse than that to a fellow that wants to work with his head and sleep with one eye open."

"You can't complain much on that score, Kit; you never made so grand a stroke in your life as that last one,--the marriage, I mean."

"It was n't bad," said Davis, as he mixed his liquor; "nor was it, exactly, the kind of hazard that every man could make. Beecher was a troublesome one,--a rare troublesome one; nobody could ever say when he 'd run straight."

"I always thought him rotten," said the other, angrily.

"Well, he is and he isn't," said Grog, deliberately.

"He has got no pluck," said Fisk, indignantly.

"He has quite enough."

"Enough--enough for what?"

"Enough for a lord. Look here, Master Fisk, so long as you have not to gain your living by anything, it is quite sufficient if you can do it moderately well. Many a first-rate amateur there is, who wouldn't be thought a tenth-rate artist."

"I 'd like to know where you had been to-day if it was n't for your pluck," said Fisk, doggedly.

"In a merchant's office in the City, belike, on a hundred and twenty pounds a year; a land steward down in Dorsetshire, at half the salary; skipper of a collier from North Shields, or an overseer in Jamaica.

These are the high prizes for such as you and me; and the droll part of the matter is, they _will_ talk of us as 'such lucky dogs,' whenever we attain to one of these brilliant successes. Gazette my son-in-law as Ambassador to Moscow, and nobody thinks it strange; announce, in the same paper, that Kit Davis has been made a gauger, and five hundred open mouths exclaim, 'How did he obtain that? Who the deuce got it for him?

Does n't he fall on his legs!' and so on."

"I suppose we shall have our turn one of these days," muttered the other, sulkily.