Colonel Battledown fought under Wellington against Soult at Orthez; and in
a charge of the French cavalry the gallant officer and genial gentleman
was cut in the head by a sabre-stroke and ridden down; and when picked up
after the battle he was dead. He was buried on the spot; the practice of
sending the corpses of heroes and others careering over the face of the
earth, in search of a spot of loam worthy to receive them, was not at that
time so fashionable as it has since become. But the news of his death came
home, and put his friends in mourning, and made Mistress Kate the heiress
of a great property at the age of fourteen. But she was older than her
years, and was generally considered to be "just the sort of person to be
an heiress," whatever that may be. I suppose she was exceedingly handsome,
with a proper sense of her importance, and a capacity of keeping an eye
upon what she considered her interests. At the same time many actions of
hers indicate that she was occasionally liable to ungovernable impulses,
and that her temper was fitful and wayward. Such a woman would make a
capital heroine for a modern novel; she would stand a lot of analyzing.

The tender relations which had subsisted between her and Archibald were
perforce broken off. What can you do with a lover who suddenly ceases to
have the most distant recollection of you, who does not believe you when
you tell him your name, and whose only associations with that name date
seven years back and are disagreeable? Nobody can blame Kate for giving
Archibald up; she would have been more than human if she could have
intrusted her heart to the keeping of a half-witted wizard, whose
mysterious likeness to, or connection with, a charming young gentleman
rendered him only the more undesirable. Poor Kate! If she gave her heart
to Archibald, and then Archibald became somebody else, what shall we say
became of her heart? Must it not have been irretrievably lost, and shall
we be surprised if we hereafter detect in her a tendency to heartlessness?