Page:Duty and Inclination 2.pdf/58

56 Passion and impetuosity accompanied his words; his rage was vented without interruption, till at lengthy exhausted, he remained as if ashamed of his own violence, or as if confounded by the tranquillity of his enemy, who sensible of the advantage his own more placid exterior must gain over his antagonist, with an assumed calmness had followed De Brooke in all the bitter reproaches he had pronounced against him, not without a consciousness that they fell not upon him undeservedly, exciting for the moment an inward compunction for the injuries he had done him.

Ambition, the love of popularity, and, to call it by no more odious name, rivalship in the race of his profession, having induced him to charge as accessible to corruption one who was his equal in military merit, and one who he was convinced bore equally with himself the stamp of unblemished honour,—how, then, he silently asked himself, could he enter into single combat with such an individual on such grounds, however furious his appeal to arms?—his was the aggression. Was he, by yielding to the present provocation, to incur the desperate alternative of either losing his own life, or of taking that of his adversary, whom already he had robbed of his good name, and