Catherine was a distant cousin, beautiful and talented, about ten years my junior.

Before Heaven, sir, on the word of a gentleman, I never persecuted her with my addresses, and if either of them ay I did, tell them from me, sir, that they lie, and I will prove it on their bodies.
Bah! I was forgetting.

I, as head of the family, was her guardian, and, although my younger brother was nearer her age, I courted her, in all honour and humility proposed to her, and was accepted with even more willingness than most women condescend to show on such occasions, and received the hearty congratulations of my brother.

Few women were ever loved better than I loved Catherine.

Conceive, Cecil, that I loved her as well as you love Miss Brentwood, and listen to what follows.
"The war-cloud burst so suddenly that, leaving my bride that was to be, to the care of my brother, and putting him in charge over my property, I hurried off to join the Landsturm, two regiments of which I had put into a state of efficiency by my sole exertions.
"You know partly what followed,--in one day an army of 150,000 men destroyed, the King in flight to Konigsberg, and Prussia a province of France.
"I fled, wounded badly, desperate and penniless, from that field.