On the 28th of March, I found myself once more in my old tent, and seeking hard to keep myself warm at the impromptu stove, constructed by my faithful old servant, poor Jack Evans. I was received with astonishment, and, I am pleased to say, with genuine satisfaction by the regiment, even by those who had flattered themselves that they had gained promotion by my supposed demise. I was welcomed by all, from the Lieutenant-colonel down to little Dicky Roll, the junior drummer, and for the first day my tent was besieged by old friends.

I had come back among them as from the dead; but more than one man, whose name figured in the lists as missing, turned up in a similar fashion during the war. My baggage had all been sent to Balaclava, the railway to which was now partly in operation; my letters and papers had been carefully sealed up in black wax by Philip Caradoc, and with other private and personal mementos of me, packed for transmission to Sir Madoc Lloyd, as my chief friend of whom he knew. Many came, I have said, to welcome me; but I missed many a familiar face, especially from among my own company, as the Fusileers had more than once been severely engaged in the trenches.

Caradoc had been wounded in the left hand by a rifle-ball; Charley Gywnne greeted me with his head in bandages, the result of a Cossack sabre-cut; Dynely, the adjutant, had also been wounded; so had Mostyn, of the Rifles, and Tom Clavell, of the 19th, when passing through "the Valley of Death." Sergeant Rhuddlan, of my company, had just rejoined, after having a ball in the chest (even Carneydd Llewellyn had lost a horn): all who came to see me had something to tell of dangers dared and sufferings undergone. All were in uniforms that were worn to rags; but all were hearty as crickets, though sick of the protracted siege, and longing to carry Sebastopol with the cold steel.

"How odd, my dear old fellow, that we should all think you drowned, and might have been wearing crape on our sleeves, but for the lack thereof in camp, and the fact that mourning has gone out of fashion since death is so common among us; while all the time you have been mewed up (by the Cossacks in the Baidar Valley) within some forty miles of us; and so stupidly, too!" said Caradoc, as we sat late in the night over our grog and tobacco in his hut.

"Not so stupidly, after all," I replied, while freely assisting myself to his cavendish.

"How?"

"There was such a girl there, Phil!" I added, with a sigh.

"Oho! where?"

"At Yalta."

"Woronzow's palace, or chateau?"

"Yes; but why wink so knowingly?"

"So, after all, you found there was balm in Gilead?" said he, laughing. "You must admit then, if she impressed you so much, that all your bitter regrets about a certain newspaper paragraph were a little overdone, and that I was a wise prophet? And what was this girl--Russian, Tartar, Greek, a Karaite Jewess, or what?"

"A pure Russian."

"Handsome?"

"Beyond any I have ever seen, beautiful!"

"Whew! even beyond la belle--"

"There, don't mention her at present, please," said I, with a little irritation, which only made him laugh the more.

"If you were love-making at Yalta, with three lance-prods in you, there was no malingering anyhow."

"I should think not."

"And so she was engaged to be married to that Russian bear, Tolstoff," he added, after I had told him the whole of my affair with Valerie.

"Yes," said I, with an unmistakable sigh.

"I think we are both destined to live and die bachelors," he resumed, in a bantering way; for though Phil had in these matters undergone, at Craigaderyn and elsewhere, "the baptism of fire" himself, he was not the less inclined to laugh at me; for of all sorrows, those of love alone excite the risible propensities.

"And so, Phil, the world's a kaleidoscope--always shifting."

"Not always couleur de rose, though?"

"And I am here again!"

"Thank God!" said he, as we again shook hands, "Faith, Harry, you must have as many lives as a cat, and so you may well have as many loves as Don Juan; but, entre nous, and excuse me, she seems to have been a bit of a flirt, your charming Valerie."

"How--why do you think so?"

"From all you have told me; moreover every woman to be attractive, should be a little so," replied Caradoc, curling his heavy brown moustache.

"I don't think she was; indeed, I am certain she was not. But if this be true, how then about Miss Lloyd; and she is attractive enough?"

At the tenor of this retort Phil's face flushed from his Crimean beard to his temples.

"There you are wrong," said he, with the slightest asperity possible; "she has not in her character a grain of coquetry, or of that which Horace calls 'the art that is not to be taught by art.' She is a pure-minded and warm-hearted English girl, and is as perfect as all th............