lifting a rose's head; was it possible I had ever refused to be her
yokefellow? Could so noble a figure of a fair young woman have been
offered and repudiated again and again by a man in his senses? I spurned
the intolerable idiot, to stop reflection. Perhaps she did likewise now.
There was nothing to alarm me save my own eagerness.

The news of my father was perplexing, leading me to suppose him
re-established in London, awaiting the coming on of his Case. Whence the
money?

Money and my father, I knew, met as they divided, fortuitously; in
illustration of which, I well remembered, while passing in view of the
Key of the Adige along the Lombard plain, a circumstance during my Alpine
tour with Temple, of more importance to him than to me, when my emulous
friend, who would never be beaten, sprained his ankle severely on the
crags of a waterfall, not far from Innsbruck, and was invited into a
house by a young English lady, daughter of a retired Colonel of Engineers
of our army. The colonel was an exile from his country for no grave
crime: but, as he told us, as much an exile as if he had committed a
capital offence in being the father of nine healthy girls. He had been,
against his judgement, he averred, persuaded to fix on his Tyrolese spot
of ground by the two elder ones. Five were now married to foreigners;
thus they repaid him, by scattering good English blood on the race of
Counts and Freiherrs! 'I could understand the decrees of Providence
before I was a parent,' said this dear old Colonel Heddon. 'I was
looking up at the rainbow when I heard your steps, asking myself whether
it was seen in England at that instant, and why on earth I should be out
of England!' He lived abroad to be able to dower his girls. His sons-
in-law were gentlemen; so far he was condemned to be satisfied, but
supposing all his girls married foreigners? His primitive frankness