Powers of Life--Roland committed the error of marriage with a girl of
whose connections he knew nothing, and of whose nature little more than
its warm, spontaneous susceptibility. In a few days subsequent to these
rash nuptials, Roland rejoined the march of the army; nor was he able to
return to Spain till after the crowning victory of Waterloo.

Maimed by the loss of a limb, and with the scars of many a noble wound
still fresh, Roland then hastened to a home, the dreams of which had
soothed the bed of pain, and now replaced the earlier visions of renown.
During his absence a son had been born to him,--a son whom he might rear
to take the place he had left in his country's service; to renew, in
some future fields, a career that had failed the romance of his own
antique and chivalrous ambition. As soon as that news had reached him
his care had been to provide an English nurse for the infant, so that
with the first sounds of the mother's endearments, the child might yet
hear a voice from the father's land. A female relation of Bolt had
settled in Spain, and was induced to undertake this duty. Natural as
this appointment was to a man so devotedly English, it displeased his
wild and passionate Ramouna. She had that mother's jealousy, strongest
in minds uneducated; she had also that peculiar pride which belongs to
her country-people of every rank and condition: the jealousy and the
pride were both wounded by the sight of the English nurse at the child's
cradle.

That Roland on regaining his Spanish hearth should be disappointed in
his expectations of the happiness awaiting him there, was the inevitable
condition of such a marriage, since, not the less for his military
bluntness, Roland had that refinement of feeling, perhaps over-
fastidious, which belongs to all natures essentially poetic; and as the
first illusions of love died away, there could have been little indeed