"But not kill him outright; I suppose he has a mother and a sweetheart, the
handsome young officer," murmured Rose pityingly to herself.

Septimius went into his house, and sat in his study for some hours, in that
unpleasant state of feeling which a man of brooding thought is apt to
experience when the world around him is in a state of intense action,
which he finds it impossible to sympathize with. There seemed to be a
stream rushing past him, by which, even if he plunged into the midst of
it, he could not be wet. He felt himself strangely ajar with the human
race, and would have given much either to be in full accord with it, or to
be separated from it forever.

"I am dissevered from it. It is my doom to be only a spectator of life; to
look on as one apart from it. Is it not well, therefore, that, sharing
none of its pleasures and happiness, I should be free of its fatalities
its brevity? How cold I am now, while this whirlpool of public feeling is
eddying around me! It is as if I had not been born of woman!"

Thus it was that, drawing wild inferences from phenomena of the mind and
heart common to people who, by some morbid action within themselves, are
set ajar with the world, Septimius continued still to come round to that
strange idea of undyingness which had recently taken possession of him.
And yet he was wrong in thinking himself cold, and that he felt no
sympathy in the fever of patriotism that was throbbing through his
countrymen. He was restless as a flame; he could not fix his thoughts upon
his book; he could not sit in his chair, but kept pacing to and fro, while
through the open window came noises to which his imagination gave diverse
interpretation. Now it was a distant drum; now shouts; by and by there
came the rattle of musketry, that seemed to proceed from some point more
distant than the village; a regular roll, then a ragged volley, then