slender thread of sentimentals, which might possibly survive it, was
soon snapt by paying post-boys, orders after luggage, and devouring
tiffin.

The only persons who felt any thing at all, were Mrs. Tracy, vexed at
her dishabille, and mortified at so cool a reception of, what she hoped,
her still unsullied beauties; and Charles, poor fellow, who ran up to
his studious retreat, and soothed his grief, as best he might, with
philosophic fancies: it was so cold, so heartless, so unkind a greeting.
Romantic youth! how should the father have known him for a son?




CHAPTER IV.

THE GENERAL AND HIS WARD.


IT is surprising what a change twenty years of a tropical sun can make
in the human constitution. The captain went forth a good-looking,
good-tempered man, destitute neither of kind feelings nor masculine
beauty: the general returned bloated, bilious, irascible, entirely
selfish, and decidedly ill-favoured. Such affections as he ever had
seemed to have been left behind in India--that new world, around which
now all his associations and remembrances revolved; and the reserve
(clearly rëproduced in Charles), the habit of silence whereof we took
due notice in the spring-tide of his life, had now grown, perhaps from
some oppressive secret, into a settled, moody, continuous taciturnity,
which made his curious wife more vexed at him than ever; for,