Page:Cuthbert Bede--Little Mr Bouncer and Tales of College Life.djvu/303

Rh the watch for her lover, Captain Alvanley was either snoring between the sheets, or dreaming of flirtations with Bessie J.! Nelly and I were altogether mystified. Had Amy been imposing upon us, and was the Dragon really a Mr. Spencer, and not an Earl? Had Amy been really expecting some one to elope with her, to whom she had given a name out of the Peerage? or was the whole affair a practical joke on her part, to relieve the tedium of a dull watering-place? But this could not be. To solve the mystery, we determined to write at once to Fred., and submit it to his tact to find out if there was any connexion between the Captain Alvanley of his regiment, and our mysterious beautiful Amy.

It was some time before the matter was perfectly cleared up. Captain Alvanley himself wrote to me a very long and sad letter, which put us in possession of all the particulars relative to his engagement with his cousin Amy. All that she had written in her letter to my sister was quite true, up to the point of the discovery of the projected elopement; beyond that, it was the mere invention of a disordered brain.

After Amy had fallen fainting into her mother's arms, she had been seized with delirium and fever. This, together with the wild excitement through which she had gone, partially unsettled her intellect. As in many other similarly sad cases, the chief feature of her disease was a settled melancholy, and a derangement only on the one point that had brought on her illness; she was under the belief that her cousin had planned another night for the elopement, and her mind dwelt upon this, as though it were a fact. Hence her letter to my sister; and hence her plans of escape. It is needless now to explain the watchful care of her father and mother;