secretly to Vienna and enlisted and served for a year as a private in the
regiment of Hussars, called, my papers tell me, Liechtenstein, and what
with his good conduct and the help of Kirby's friends, he would have
obtained a commission from the emperor, when, at the right moment to keep
a sprig of Kirby's growth for his country, Lord Levellier sent word that
he was down for a cornetcy in a British regiment of dragoons. Chillon
came home from a garrison town, and there was a consultation about his
future career. Shall it be England? Shall it be Austria? Countess
Fanny's voice was for England, and she carried the vote, knowing though
she did that it signified separation, and it might be alienation--where
her son would chance to hear things he could not refute. She believed
that her son by such a man as Kirby would be of use to his country, and
her voice, against herself, was for England.

It broke her heart. If she failed to receive the regular letter, she
pined and was disconsolate. He has heard more of me! was in her mind.
Her husband sat looking at her with his old large grey glassy eyes. You
would have fancied him awaiting her death as the signal for his own
release. But she, poor mother, behind her weeping lids beheld her son's
filial love of her wounded and bleeding. When there was anything to be
done for her, old Kirby was astir. When it was nothing, either in physic
or assistance, he was like a great corner of rock. You may indeed
imagine grief in the very rock that sees its flower fading to the
withered shred. On the last night of her life this old man of past
ninety carried her in his arms up a flight of stairs to her bed.

A week after her burial, Kirby was found a corpse in the mountain forest.
His having called the death of his darling his lightning-stroke must have
been the origin of the report that he died of lightning. He touched not
a morsel of food from the hour of the dropping of the sod on her coffin